


I'll Meet You Here With Words on my Skin and Love in my Heart

by NerdyKat



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-12 19:38:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 26,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5678158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NerdyKat/pseuds/NerdyKat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Throwing my hat in the ring for Soulmate Shorts. Concept borrowed from amusewithaview's Soulmates AU and ozhawk's Soulmate Shorts</p><p>Anyone is welcome to prompt me or contact me: <a href="http://a-nerdy-kat.tumblr.com/ask">Prompt Me Here</a>, <a href="http://a-nerdy-kat.tumblr.com">Check Out My Tumblr Feed</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction/Index

So here are my shorts. For the most part it'll be simple pairs anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 words per pairing (3,000 for any triads that I throw in there). The story goes that Amusewithaview has already written an amazing chapter fic about Darcy Lewis and her possible soulmates called **_[Write Love On My Skin](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1835587/chapters/3943753%22)_** _,_ OzHawk then threw her own hat in the ring starting shorts about soulmates meeting, her  **[Crackship Armada](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2658407/chapters/5941115)**. And things snowballed from there... 

As is commonplace with these, these are first meetings, so no sexual content will be included in these, though follow-up fics are welcome with permission - I've already started plotting out the follow up on a couple of these.

 

Soulmate Shorts Index by chapter number:

  1. Introduction/Index

  2. Skye/Brock                                               sequel reserved by me!

  3. Natasha/Maria/Fitz

  4. Sif/Skye

  5. Helen Cho/Wade Wilson (Deadpool)

  6. Skye/Clint

  7. Steve/Jane/Bucky

  8. Bucky/Skye

  9. Darcy/Thor
  10. Steve/Skye

  11. Steve/Jemma  
  

  12. Tony/Skye  
  

  13. Phil/May, platonic Skye  

  14. Steve/Skye/Bucky




	2. Against the Cold and Friendless Tide (Brock/Skye)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a universe where soulmates are common, Skye is sent undercover in HYDRA instead of Jemma and meets her soulmate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMPORTANT: Slight warning - this short contains a character being dosed with a date rape drug, but no rape is even attempted.

Skye sipped her cocktail as she looked around the room. Being undercover really wasn’t so hard, especially with a job as boring as Level 2 support for HYDRA. It was amazing to her the technical incompetence of the general population, even those who were members of secret, evil organizations.

 

After SHIELD fell, Coulson had needed someone to go undercover in HYDRA. He was going to send Jemma, but Skye pointed out that her contacts at the Rising Tide gave her a better shot at not getting caught. Apart from the fact that she could actually lie, it was an easier sell for her to pull off that she was amoral and would work for the highest bidder (mostly because she _was_ amoral and most hackers _would_ work for the highest bidder).

 

It wasn’t like she was a massive SHIELD cheerleader to begin with. She had worked towards freedom of information for nearly a decade, and SHIELD had been the cause of a shockingly bad childhood. Sure they had kept her safe, but it had led to a totally sucky childhood. Plus getting shot in the stomach twice hadn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. HYDRA had no trouble believing her story.

 

“Skye?” the voice pulled her out of her traitorous thoughts and she looked up to Brody, one of the other Level 2 supervisors, standing in front of her and chewing his lip.

 

“What’s up, Brody?” she asked.

 

“Whitehall broke his computer again,” Brody said with an eyeroll. “Could you do me a solid and go up first thing tomorrow morning? Probably just needs a restart, but he insists that a manager come by.”

 

Skye nodded. “Tired of going up there after, what was it, six times today?” she asked with a smirk.

 

“Try seven,” Brody said. “Serves me right for giving him my personal cell.”

 

“I tried to warn you,” Skye said. “Don’t worry, I’ll cover for you tomorrow.” She turned back to her drink, smiling to herself as she took another sip. No one ever looked at the IT people in an organization and it gave her an all-access pass to all kinds of information.

 

Taking another sip, Skye felt all her worries about getting caught and Fitz and Ward and everything going on in her life slipping away. Everything felt good. Something niggled at the back of her mind, poking at her that something was wrong, but she paid it no mind, taking another sip. She was enjoying the night. Her coworkers respected her. She felt free and… she tilted sideways into a solid wall of flesh.

 

“Hey, are you okay?” came a concerned voice.

 

Skye giggled. “I’m awesome, possum!” she giggled again, then realized something. “Hey! You said my ssssoulwords,” she said, frowning slightly. She was having trouble forming words. The muscles around her stiffened.

 

“How many drinks have you had?” the solid wall of flesh asked. She looked up. He was so _tall_ and had such a handsome face. She reached up and touched his shoulder. He was strong.

 

Skye giggled again. “Jussst got here silly. Just started my drink!” She held up her index finger, looked at it and noticed that she had two fingers up, then corrected herself, giggling again.

 

A second solid wall of flesh reached from behind her and put a little stick in her drink. It beeped and her soulmate cursed. “GHB, Jack. Someone dosed her.”

 

Skye swayed and her soulmate caught her. Skye giggled again at the feeling of swinging. “Damn,” came a response from someone behind him. “There’s no way to figure out who in this crowd.”

 

“Grab the security feeds? We can figure something out later. They’re HYDRA at least. They won’t get far,” her soulmate said. He turned to her. “I’m Brock, hon. Do you know your name?”

 

“Skye?” Skye said distantly. “I think? Yeah, I’m Skye.”

 

“Come on, hon. I’m gonna get you out of here, okay?” Brock said.

 

“Okay,” Skye repeated, allowing herself to be led out of the bar. That small, nagging feeling told that she didn’t know this guy. She didn’t know for sure they were soulmates. The feeling told her that she shouldn’t be letting him do this, but she was just so damn happy that she let him.

 

Skye lost track of the hallways she was being led down until a wave of nausea hit and she heaved. With reflexes fast enough to make her feel even dizzier than she already was, Brock grabbed a trash can from somewhere, just in time to catch a truly impressive amount of vomit. She groaned and felt her knees give out, but a strong arm caught her before she toppled to the floor. Another arm hooked under her knees and lifted her easily.

 

“Strong,” Skye said with a weak smile. “Good. Let's go have shower sex.”

 

Laughter vibrated from the broad chest that she was curled against. “Not that I don’t see the logic in that, hon, but the only place you’re going is the medical wing.”

 

“No needles,” Skye argued. “They suck. Don’t wanna go.”

 

“You will,” Brock said in a far different voice than before. Skye scrunched up her face. “I know they suck, but it’s important.”

 

“What happened?” someone else asked, sounding bored. A woman.

 

“Someone dosed her with GHB twelve minutes ago,” Brock said. He laid her on a soft bed. Skye reached out and grabbed his hand. Her soulmate. She had a soulmate… maybe more than one? She didn’t really remember.

 

“Jesus,” the woman cursed. “They probably gave her too much. I need you to move out of this area.”

 

“I’m her soulmate,” Brock said. “I’m staying.”

 

The woman sighed. “Fine, just try to stay out of our way,” she conceded. “Hey, I need a heart monitor and some activated charcoal over here!”

 

Someone was shining a bright light in her eyes and it hurt. She whimpered. Brock was rubbing the back of her hand. Someone else was shoving something down her throat and suddenly, all she could feel was a freezing cold and a all-too-familiar pain in her stomach. She felt the blood as it covered her stomach. She had to get out of there. People were shouting as she tried to pull the tube out. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want it. People, then some kind of fabric, were holding her hands down. She was going to die. Again.

 

“Someone go get the droperidol!” someone shouted.

 

“Got it!” Voices were starting to blend together. She could feel Brock clutching her hand and she clung back as hard as she could. And then there was a pinch and the world slowed down.

 

“Ok, she’s back with us. Keep an eye on that heart monitor for bradycardia and make sure she doesn’t go into respiratory arrest.”

 

She blinked and saw Brock, looking terrified as he looked down at her. There was something wet on her cheek as Brock got as close as he could. “I’ll find out who did this,” Brock promised. “I’ll find them and then I’ll kill them.”

 

She flinched as someone inserted a needle into the hand that Brock didn’t occupy. She tried to object but there was a tube in her throat and all that came out were moans. All of a sudden she was tired. Her eyes closed. Nothing anyone was saying was making any sense. The only thing that did was that her soulmate was there, and he didn’t seem to want to go anywhere. She clung desperately to his hand, the only stable anchor she had as the world swirled around her and faded to black.

 

*****

 

When she opened her eyes, she got up, not knowing where she was, and immediately regretted her decision. If felt like she had the worst hangover of her life on top of being hit by a truck. Her stomach rolled and she closed her eyes again, swaying where she stood.

 

“Hey, hon. Lay back down, okay?”

 

Strong hands led her forcefully but not violently back to where she’d been lying down. In fact, there was tenderness to his touch as he stroked her hair. “What happened?” she asked she squinted and saw that the lights had been turned down and a dark-haired man was sitting in a chair next to her. She knew that face. Everyone in all of creation knew that face. The man fighting Captain America. But Coulson had said that all reports indicated that he was dead. People had still talked about him. Brock Rumlow: former STRIKE commander, extremely high combat marks, and all-around ruthless bastard.

 

“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.

 

She was dead. She was _so_ dead. She tried to think back, realizing there was a huge chunk of time missing and trying not to panic about it. “Ummm. I was in the computer lab, working on a hard drive repair,” she said quietly. Her voice was hoarse and she coughed. Rumlow was immediately on his feet, raising her bed - her hospital bed? He poured her a glass of water and helped her take a couple sips. She gagged. Everything tasted like charcoal.

 

“Look, I don’t want you to be scared so I’m going to warn you before saying this. You went to the bar last night and someone dosed you with GHB. Then you immediately ran into me. He lifted his shirt and Skye’s eyes went wide as she saw words, in her handwriting, across his abs. _I’m awesome possum! Hey! You said my soul words!_

 

“Holy shit!” she breathed. This was not good. This was not good at all. “You’re Rumlow,” she said. “You’re Brock Rumlow.”

 

Brock tenderly tucked some stray hairs behind her ear. “You’re my soulmate. You get to call me Brock,” he said. “Can I call you Skye?”

 

Skye nodded mutely. He couldn’t be totally evil. Anything could have happened last night, but she was pretty sure nothing had. She certainly wasn’t sore in all the wrong places.

 

“What are you thinking about, Skye?” Brock asked her.

 

She frowned, considering her answer. “You didn’t… I thought… you brought me here? Why?”

 

Brock looked furious for an instant at the implication. “I wouldn’t,” he growled. “I would never, understand me?”

 

Skye looked down, “Yes,” she said softly.

 

“I know I have a reputation for ruthlessness, but there are some things that are too despicable - no one should _ever_ do something like that.” Skye flinched, remembering Ward. “I would have helped you out even if you weren’t my soulmate,” Brock said. He stroked her cheek tenderly and Skye found herself leaning into the touch without meaning to. “My team and I, we’re going to figure out who did this to you. No one messes with my soulmate and gets away with it.”

 

Skye stared at him wide-eyed. Somehow, easily the most ruthless man on Earth had been utterly successful in both soothing her and making her feel safer than she had ever felt. She didn’t trust the system, but maybe, just maybe, she could trust her soulmate. At least until she could get herself out of HYDRA.


	3. Aliens! (Natasha/Maria Hill/Fitz)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place just after the Avengers film.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by my good friend Miss. Moonstone

Aliens. Aliens had attacked New York and left half the city in shambles. It was like an episode of Doctor Who except the aliens didn’t leave after a few words from a strange man who sounded like he was from Britain. Instead, SHIELD had piles of rubble to sort through and clean up in a matter of two days. Most of the SHIELD had been assigned to help clear any alien tech that was in the rubble. The job was to get in and out without a whole lot of questions being answered by the general public. Fitz was assigned by Doctor Weaver to be one of the engineers to clear alien debris within Stark Tower under the watchful eyes of Agent Maria Hill.

He had actually been assigned to the top floor of the tower, in the same room as Agent Hill, though her eyes barely left the security screens she was monitoring, keeping a watchful eye on all agents within the tower as well as continuing incoming reports from other SHIELD agents. While the damage to New York was extensive, they still had to keep a watchful eye on the rest of the world. A few very skilled STRIKE teams were rumored to have been stationed around the world, but that was someone else’s job. Right now, Fitz was wondering if he could develop tiny robots that could do all the scanning that was required so that they wouldn’t have to do everything by hand.

He continued checking the floor inch by inch for any debris. When the floor was cleared, Fitz knelt over his kit, packing up to go on to the next floor, just below them. A flash of red and black passed by and Fitz looked up to see the Black Widow tackle Agent Hill. Fitz tensed instinctively until he saw Maria start to rub Natasha’s back. “I’m okay,” she heard Natasha murmur. “We’re okay.”

“I could have lost you,” Natasha said, her voice muffled by Maria’s shoulder.

“But you didn’t,” Maria said. Maria pulled away from Natasha, trying and failing to look stern. “But ‘love is for children?’ really? You might want to think about turning the amp on your Black Widow persona up past 11 because I honestly don’t know if it’s high enough.”

“It worked, didn’t it,” Natasha said with a noncommittal shrug. She placed a hand on Maria’s stomach. “Besides, one day love will be for children. Our children. I’ve known this ever since you said my words” Fitz’s eyes went wide. It wasn’t common knowledge that Agents Romanoff and Hill were together, let alone _soulmates_. Unconsciously, Fitz thought of his own soulmarks. He had yet to meet them, but looked forward to that day. That day would be magical.

Maria suddenly seemed to notice that they weren’t alone in the room. “Can I help you with something?” she asked sharply.

Fitz broke out of his stupor, unsure of what he could say that _wouldn’t_ result in being murdered by Natasha Romanoff. “I’m part of the clean-up crew from SciTech. You assigned me here, ma’am.” Fitz said. He recognized Maria’s words as one of the soulmarks he had, but the comment was so common that it barely registered.

Natasha and Maria exchanged a look before Natasha stepped forward. “Вы узнаете эти слова?”

Fitz’s eyes widened. Russian. He had learned Russian as a teenager because of those words. ‘Do you recognize those words?’, which curled around his left thigh, had led him to the correct hypothesis that he’d meet his soulmates at the same time. “Д-Да. У меня есть свои слова,” he managed to blurt out. ‘Yes, I have your words.’ He never thought that the Russian on his thigh would have been said by Natasha Romanoff.

For the first time in his life, Fitz’s mind couldn’t seem to catch up with what was happening in front of him. He had always found Agents Hill and Romanoff to be beautiful. Who wouldn’t? He even fantasized about each of them once or twice (what they didn't know couldn't hurt them, right?), but never in his wildest dreams did he ever presume to think that _they_ would be his soulmates. He wondered how in the world he had pleased Fate so much that he was given two such  beautiful women.

Everyone, it seemed, stood frozen within the room, staring at each other until Tony Stark came in, holding a tablet a few moments later. “Hill, I know that Fury sent you here to clear all the debris from Loki’s temper tantrum away from the tower, but can you stop allowing the agents to use the personal elevator? I have a service elevator that works perfectly fine.”

The moment broken, Fitz snapped up and returned to his job, his hands shaking as heat colored his cheeks. The reality of the situation sunk in. Surely they wouldn’t want someone like him. This was _Natasha Romanoff_ and _Maria Hill_. They could do so much better than him. Stark seemed not to notice Fitz, at least.

“Pepper told me that she was claiming it as part of her twelve percent of the tower,” Hill said. “She says she likes looking at the sweaty workmen.”

“At least get some lady-scientists down here at some point then? This is the age of STEM is it not?” Fitz glared at Tony, ever-defensive of his best friend Jemma, even if she wasn’t in the room and Stark had no knowledge of her. Stark looked between him, Hill, and Romanoff, curious.

“Say, what’s going on-” the billionaire started to say.

“Go talk to Pepper, Stark,” Hill snapped.

“Fine, geez. Point taken. Do your thing,” Stark quipped, then left the penthouse. “I’ve got Avengers to assemble. Romanoff, we’re going to have that meeting later.”

Fitz bent over scanning alien debris, blushing bright red. He refused to look at his two soulmates. He could feel them staring at him which made him blush further. This wasn’t him. He might not be an agent but he certainly wasn’t afraid of a little action (and a little more _action_ ). He certainly shouldn’t be afraid of his soulmates. Even if they were way out of his league.

Fitz straightened and looked both women in the eye, determined to see this through. “I’ll just be going then. I mean, there’s a lot to do and we need to be out of here as quickly as possible. Can’t have anyone getting too curious. I mean, about the aliens, of course. Because you’re lives are private and -” Maria rushed over and grabbed him, kissing him hard. The pull towards the first of his two soulmates was too strong. He kissed her back, as hard as he could muster. He placed his hands on the small of Maria’s back. He was getting aroused just by the _idea_ of both of his soulmates double-teaming him. He squeaked when he felt heated, wet kisses peppering the back of his neck. He’d never realized that Agent Romanoff was so short. She seemed so tall, even in briefings that he had sat in on when he provided tech to her STRIKE team.

They were both, in fact, shorter than him, he noted with a certain amount of male pride. Maria broke the kiss, her hand weaving it’s way through his thick, curly hair. “We’ve been looking for you for such a long time, and here you were, right in front of our noses,” Maria said tenderly.

“Guess Fate was waiting for the right moment,” Fitz said.

“You speak Russian?” Natasha asked. The three of them somehow organically migrated to a couch on the other side of the room. Fitz somehow found himself in the middle, Maria still playing with his hair while Natasha, who was surprisingly tactile when she wasn’t playing the role of the Black Widow, curled up to Fitz’s side. Fitz could see them doing this together fifty years from now.

Fitz nodded, realizing that he hadn’t yet answered. “I learned while I was earning my first Ph.D. in mechanical engineering,” he said. Both Maria and Natasha looked impressed and Fitz blushed again. “Just a little side-project,” he said. “I wanted to know what my mark said, and I assumed if I had a mark in Russian, I should probably learn.”

They weren’t able to talk for long. Inevitably, Natasha was pulled into a meeting with the remaining Avengers, and Maria was needed to oversee the cleaning up of the city, but they all had the night off as mandated in the SHIELD Manual (Section 42L, Paragraph 5) that they were permitted downtime for the bond to take a hold. Soul bonds were no joke, even in SHIELD. Fitz finished bagging and tagging, but found that he didn’t want to leave Maria. He had situated himself by his mate, talking with her in short bursts in between phone calls. He tried his best to make her smile, since it made his heart leap every time that he saw the tension ease from her eyes, but eventually, he knew he had to leave to meet Jemma.

“Fitz, you would not believe the day I’ve had,” Jemma ranted. “The biochem analysis of the aliens is going to take months, one of the STRIKE teams had to be quarantined due because they were dumb enough to actually step inside that huge space whale that crashed into Grand Central, _and_ Doctor Sullivan says that I can watch the autopsy of one of the Chitauri. It’s exhilarating.” Jemma stopped. “Fitz, are you okay? You look really pale. What happened?”

Fitz looked at Jemma, the reality that Natasha Romanoff and Maria Hill were his soulmates. They had both made him promise to keep it quiet - both had too many enemies that would use Fitz to get Natasha and SHIELD, and now the Avengers, to cooperate.  Fitz took a few tries to open his mouth. “Aliens.”

*****

Maria hadn’t wanted him going on the Bus and neither had Natasha. Even Fitz had been extremely reluctant to go, not for the adventure, but from being apart from his soulmates. They had bonded months ago, quite stupendously, but no one but Fury knew the truth about the three of them. Natasha and Maria were too afraid of losing Fitz to allow anyone, even Jemma, to know. Jemma had wanted to go on the Bus so badly that Fitz had a hard time saying no to the request. Maria said that it was because he was feeling guilty that he hadn’t been able to tell her. It was probably true, but it didn’t mean that leaving his soulmates didn’t suck any less. Their goodbyes had not been brief, and had truthfully been mostly naked, but they all understood. This was the life of a SHIELD agent, and Fitz would be back on his next furlough. Maria had run a hand through her hair, kissed him firmly, and made him swear up and down that he wouldn’t actively seek out combat.

Natasha, who had been training Fitz in secret (“just in case”), pressed a number into the palm of his hand one night. “Memorize it, Misha,” she said. “You call it if you get even a hint of trouble and the Avengers will come help you.”

Fitz stared at the Bus as Jemma excitedly jabbered next to him. Maria was right. This really was a whole new world.


	4. The Briefest Touch Can Change the World (Sif/Skye)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This would pick up during 2x12, Who You Really Are, when Skye's powers are revealed.

The ground shook. Everyone looked around nervously. “Son of Coul, what is this?” Sif demanded.  
  
May immediately took a step towards Skye, projecting peace and calm. Sif regarded the pair curiously. Skye appeared to be panicking and pieces started fitting together in Sif’s mind.  
  
“Skye... you want to talk to us?” Coulson asked nervously as the cups near the sink started to rattle. “Skye, what's doing this?”  
  
The young woman looked small and scared. “I am,” she said, voice weak and shaky. Sif frowned. Lady Skye was the Kree weapon. How had she missed it?  
  
Sif made a grab for her and made contact just for a moment. Skye shrieked as electricity ran through both of their bodies. Sif was shocked herself, but the jolt unfortunately shattered Skye’s control. May grabbed her and dragged her bodily down the hall. Sif gave chase, but the Midgardians were swift. They raised some sort of shield  and Sif withdrew her blade to break it. After 1200 years, nothing could get between her and her bond mate.  
  
“Agent May, let me in, please!” Sif shouted. The quake increased and Sif redoubled her efforts, terrified harm would come to her mate.  
  
The shield finally shattered and Sif rushed in, seeing Skye shoot herself with a gun, then collapse.  “She harmed herself!” Sif cried. There was a clatter of a sword as Sif gathered Skye into her arms in grief and stroked her mate’s hair. “Please, not when I've waited all these long years. Please, not when I've finally found you.”  
  
She sobbed into Skye's hair, rocking herself and her mate. The small crowd of people stared until May glared at them into dispersing. “ Lady Sif, I'm not sure I follow...”  
  
Sif looked up and stared, eyes shining, “Are you familiar, Lady May, of the concept of soulmates?”  
  
Coulson looked at May, “There are some that say that they are, but there isn't any definitive system. Is there on Asgard?”  
  
Sif nodded. “It is known on Asgard that when two soulmates touch, they are marked for the rest of their days.” She extended her hand to show May and Coulson them the pattern of stars that now covered the inside of Sif's left thumb and two of her fingers. A pattern of swirls nearly surrounded Skye's right wrist where Sif had grabbed her mate. Sif stared at them. “It is my name,” Sif said sadly. “I found my soulmate and she perished at her own hand in fear of me.”  
  
“Lady Sif,” May said carefully. “Skye isn't dead.”  
  
“What?” Sif stared, wide-eyed at the Son of Coul and Lady May. She did not dare to hope.  
  
“She’s only stunned,” Son of Coul explained.  
  
“A clever magic,” Sif said in relieved. “I must beg her forgiveness. If she prefers that I not remain a part of her life, then I must accept that as my fate.”  
  
“Sif, can I ask,” Son of Coul started awkward. “What I mean to ask is, how long have you been searching for her?”  
  
“Twelve hundred years I have been looking, Son of Coul. I despaired in my youth that I could not find my mate, and joined Odin's army. I thought perhaps if I proved myself, my ancestors who had gone to Valhalla would lead me to her. It seems that I have, but only for them to show me what a fool I still am.”  
  
“If she goes with you, will she be harmed or imprisoned?”  
  
Sif shook her head. “On my honor as a warrior, I would see her trained, properly. If it were out of her control, she could tear apart continents. I would not see her have to bear the burden of being the wielder of such actions.”  
  
“And others on Asgard?”  
  
“What the Kree did was horrific. I believe that many consider it an act of pity to end the victims’ lives; Odin decreed long ago that the Kree weapons should not be killed on sight but must be judged for their intents and actions. No one would go against that decree. I wished to return her to Asgard because Lady Skye has done nothing wrong, but her power requires training.” Sif paused. “You told me of her when we were on the sky ship,” Sif said. “If I had met her then and not been distracted by Lorelai, much would be different right now.”  
  
“If I hadn’t taken on Loki, you might have never met her,” Son of Coul pointed out.  
  
Sif wanted to stay with Skye, but Son of Coul convinced her to allow him to speak with her first. May took her to the kitchen and handed her a cup of tea. “Does everyone on Asgard have a soulmate?” May asked.  
  
Sif nodded, sipping the drink to calm her nerves. “The Allfather and Queen Frigga are the most well-known, but we all have a soulmate somewhere. Fate decrees it so; marks appear the first time you touch your mate. Many find their mates on Asgard, while others are on mostly on Vanaheim or Alfheim.”  
  
“She’s awake,” Son of Coul said, entering the kitchen. “And she’s willing to talk to you.”  
  
Sif rose. “I thank you,” she said to Lady May, “for your company.” For a second Sif thought that her fellow warrior appeared somewhat teary-eyed. She got the impression that there was something of a maternal instinct within Lady May for Skye.  
  
Sif followed Son of Coul down to Vault D. The young Midgardian looked so small and timid on the bed that Sif had to suppress her desire to wrap her up in blankets and keep her safe and loved forever.  
  
Sif cautiously unsheathed her sword and laid it down in front of the bed. Sif knelt, bowing her head. “I apologize, Lady Skye. I hastily judged before fully understanding the situation or explaining my position. By Odin’s decree, no harm shall come to you.”  
  
There was a long silence, during which Sif did not move. “I suppose… I mean… no one got hurt, so I suppose it’s alright.”  
  
Sif rose her head and examined her mate’s features. Twenty-five years seemed like such a short time for someone who had lived hundreds. “Please tell me how I may ease your anxiety? I have some skill in arts beyond being a warrior. Perhaps a traditional Asgardian meal?”  
  
Skye’s eyes opened wide for a moment, then she closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m fine.”  
  
Sif stiffened, noting the slight tension around Skye’s eyes and mouth. “What ails you?” Sif asked.  
  
“My… uh… the ICER that I used to stun myself gives you a pretty nasty headache,” Skye noted.  
  
Sif sat in a chair beside Skye’s bed and extended both hands. “May I try something?” Skye looked at her warily, but nodded. Sif brushed her fingertips to the temples on either side of Skye’s head, Skye gave a pleasurable moan as Sif began to kneed her thumbs into the temples tenderly.  
  
Skye wilted towards Sif, humming with pleasure. “Coulson, uh… Coulson told me that you could explain this?” Skye asked lifting her wrist. By instinct, Sif brushed the swirls on Skye’s wrist, the edge of her own mark touching for the  briefest of moments. They both shuddered with pleasure. “What?” Skye demanded, shocked. “What did you do to me?”  
  
Sif considered her words. “I am told that among your people you do not have soulmates. On Asgard, the first touch between you and your mate marks you as a mated pair. The Fates are never wrong.”  
  
“ _Mated?_ ” Skye asked, wide-eyed.  
  
Sif bowed her head. “I do not presume to think that you might want me due to my initial rejection of you, but please allow me to ensure that you are not burdened by your gift. You’re power can used for so much good, but if it slips from your control… I do not wish to see you suffer thus.”  
  
Panic started to engulf Skye once more, Sif could see it in wide, wild eyes and tears and slightly opened lips. Sif set again to rubbing Skye’s temples. Giving as much calm through the bond as she could without alerting her.

  
*****  


Sif told Skye of her childhood - of no one taking seriously as a warrior until she proved them all wrong and earned a place as a guard in Odin’s palace. Skye in turn spoke of growing up alone and rejected by all who met her. Sif was shocked by the idea of an orphanage and explained in depth that communities on Asgard were obligated to raise an orphan, especially when one’s parents had gone to Valhalla, like Skye’s mother had. The Allfather looked down on a community that could not take care of its young.  
  
Skye liked the idea and far sooner than she was expecting, she said, “I’ll go with you.” Sif looked shocked, causing Skye to blush, “I-I mean, if that’s okay with you. Coulson said you waited 1200 years for me and… I don’t - I don’t know why, but I trust you.”

*****

“So y-you’re... going with her?”  
  
Skye smiled. Fitz had asked her almost the same thing when she arrived on the Bus. “They can help me,” Skye said softly. “I want to learn control.”  
  
“Lady Sif could be… lying,” Fitz pointed out.  
  
Skye shook her head. “She’s not. I know it seems weird. I get crazy-scary earthquake powers and suddenly an Asgardian says I’m her soulmate and I’m leaving… but I need to learn control.” Skye watched Fitz carefully for his reaction, hoping he understood. “Besides, tension here is high and Ward and Cal are still out there… maybe this is for the best.”  
  
Fitz suddenly rushed her and hugged her tightly. “I’m really going t’miss you,” he said, his brogue thickening.  
  
“I’ll miss you too,” Skye said quietly. She’d never forget everything Fitz had done for her. “But once I get a handle on my power, I’ll be back to visit.”  
  
Breaking the hug, Fitz situated himself on Skye’s bed as she packed. Despite her pride in her life fitting in a dufflebag and a box, she had still acquired some knick-knacks over the last year. She and Fitz went to the front door where Coulson, May, Sif and Vintak were waiting. Skye took a nervous step back when Vintak spotted her, but from his bored expression he didn’t even recognize her.  
  
“Well, I guess this is it,” Skye said awkwardly. She hugged Fitz once more, wondering if she’d ever see him again. Fitz, as always, seemed to understand.  She looked down at the floor, wishing Jemma was there to say goodbye to. Leaving Fitz on base, the five traveled to the spot away from the base that allowed room for the Bifrost.  
  
May squeezed her shoulder, causing her to look up again. “Don’t slack on your training,” May advised.  
  
Skye smiled. “Somehow I doubt anyone there will let me do that.” Skye said, setting her things down and pulling May into a hug. Surprisingly, May didn’t stiffen, but hugged her back tightly.  
  
The two broke the hug and Skye turned to Coulson. “Guess it really was Fate that crossed our paths.”  
  
“You stay safe,” Coulson said thickly. “And send word to us as often as you can?”  
  
“I don’t think they have e-mail on Asgard,” Skye quipped, then sobered. “But I’ll do everything I can to keep you posted.” Coulson wrapped her a tight hug and Skye had to _shove_ the tears down.  
  
Breaking away, Skye picked her stuff up and gave Sif a tentative smile. She turned to AC and May. “See you when I see you,” she said, taking Sif’s hand.  
  
“Heimdell, open the Bifrost,” Sif called. Maybe it was the bond forming, but Skye couldn’t help but feel like she was finally going home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1,961 words.


	5. The Zombie and the Cradle (Helen Cho/Wade Wilson | Deadpool)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I confess, this one was a weird one. For a lot of my pairings, I put all the Marvel characters in a random string chooser and have the machine select two to pull out. I sometimes mention the pairing to my friends and my friend Ozhawk half-demanded that I needed to write it. Thus this extremely weird pairing was born.

“Clint got hurt again,” Natasha said to the nearly-empty room.

Helen looked up from inventory and groaned, grabbing her go-bag. “Where are we going this time,” she said. “And what happened?”

“Mutated squid,” Natasha reported. “Woods Hole. It’s pretty bad. Clint’s okay though, but we think he ruptured his eardrum again. And he might have broken his leg… can’t ever be too sure with Clint.”

Helen winced. Some of the best marine biologists in the country worked out of Woods Hole this time of year. “And he wouldn’t be able to tell due to his disability,” Helen said. Not many people knew that an Avenger, the World’s Greatest Marksman, was almost completely deaf. While on some level he wanted to tell people - show disabled people that they really could be anything if they worked around their challenges, there was some concern for his safety if word got out. That concern coming from other people, of course. Chief among them, Helen herself.

It didn’t take long for them to fly to Woods Hole - not when it was such a short distance and with Stark tech at their fingertips.

Natasha led Helen to her partner, who was lying next to a man in a skin-tight leather suit. “He pushed me out of the way,” Clint said hollowly, following Helen’s gaze. “Snapped his neck when he was thrown into a wall.”

“Who was he?” Helen asked, starting to examine Clint. The dead man had the look of a superhero. It was a pity, they needed more of those in the world.

“No idea. The guy just showed up, yammering the entire time. Stark was dumb enough to actually -” Clint groaned as Helen moved his leg. “Engage with the asshole.”

Helen smiled. “Well I guess we should get you back to the tower. You’re going to be out of commission for a while. Broken bones don’t mend themselves and that eardrum’s gonna take a good three months to fully heal.”

“All I need is a good night’s rest and I’ll be right as rain, doc, no need to make a big deal about it,” Clint argued.

“Yeah, that’s not what your wife tells me,” Helen said quietly so that only he and Natasha could hear her. Clint’s family wasn’t common knowledge but, as Laura was Clint’s medical proxy, Helen was required to know.

“She’s gonna be pissed,” Clint groaned quietly.

Another groan was heard near them then. Helen looked around, but didn’t see anything. On edge, she returned to checking on Clint. Clint instantly sensed Helen’s tension.

“What?” Clint asked, trying to sit up and look around.

Helen shoved Clint down. “Stay down. It’s nothing. I just thought I heard something.”

Helen set to work splinting Clint’s leg so they could get him to where they could cast it. Halfway through splinting his leg, she heard it again. A loud moan. Helen tensed again, getting up and walking a few feet in every direction, looking for the source of the moaning.

She picked up a spare bit of wood that seemed to have been debris from a restaurant’s patio, lifting it like a bat.

She was met with dead silence. Apart from her, Clint, and a couple poor souls who hadn’t survived, there was no one around for ten or twenty yards.

“Everything okay?” Clint asked, following Helen’s gaze.

“I don’t know,” Helen said honestly. “I keep hearing groaning.”

The man in red moved suddenly, causing both Helen and Clint to move away from him, the movement causing Clint to whimper as he clutched his leg instinctively. It was then that the man in red sat up.

"Zombie!” Helen shrieked. “Oh my god, a zombie!"

The man seemed to smile, though Helen couldn’t tell since his mouth was under the mask.

“You'll have to aim for a whole different head if you're going to unmake me, darlin’,” he drawled.

Helen wasn’t able to process what she was seeing in front of her. She had checked this guy’s pulse herself. He was unequivocally dead not ten minutes ago and now he was sitting up and talking to them.

Helen heard a bang and the man fell backwards. She looked down at Clint who was holding his needle gun, the gun he used for his flechettes, with a shaking arm. Even with Clint’s shaking arm, they were too close for it to be anything but a headshot. Natasha was holding both her guns at Wade’s head too.

“Man, that smarts,” the man said, sitting up again and pulling the flechette out of his head. “Could we maybe not do that so often? The healing factor I got, but I still feel pain.”

Helen had heard others say during outlandish, big-fish tales and in fantasy novels about how time stood still the moment they met their soulmate. Helen now knew how they felt. She stood stock-still. Not believing the words she heard. No way. No way was this man could be her soulmate. “H-h-healing factor?” Helen finally stammered out.

“Yup,” the man chirped. “They haven’t invented a weapon yet that can kill me. No matter what, I always come back. You never have to worry about losing me. I’m Deadpool, but you and only you can call me Wade.” Wade looked up at Natasha. “Ohmaigosh! Nattie!” he cried. He suddenly leapt to his feet and engulfed Natasha in a tackling hug. “How’s my favorite megasuperfoxyawesomehot Russian spyssassin? I haven’t seen you since Kiev. Remember that place right by the river where you nearly kissed me because those guards were onto us? That was awesome. Not as awesome as the fact that I woke up one morning and New York was exploding and you were on TV and -” There was a large bang and Wade was blown off Natasha’s body.

Natasha was stone faced as her sidearm smoked slightly.

“I’m sorry, Nattie?” Came the voice of Tony Stark.

Natasha immediately whipped around and put a gun to Tony’s head. “You ever call me that, Stark, and you’ll be taking a dirt nap,” Natasha growled. Tony gulped and nodded before Natasha lowered her weapon.

Helen was just staring at Wade’s body. At the large hole in his chest - which was closing over right before her incredulous eyes.

“That’s not even possible,” she gaped.

“You live with the Hulk, a super soldier from the 40s, and an egotistical billionaire who saves the world in a metal suit, but this is what’s impossible?” Wade asked, grunting as the hole closed completely. “There have been reports of mutants going back a long ways. This shouldn’t really be all that shocking.”

“I-I-I just…” Helen said, speechless, her scientific mind processing the possibilities of the application of such abilities. If she could bottle this, could T.A.H.I.T.I. really work? Of course, there was a smaller part of her mind that had been frequently shoved down to a corner during her adult life that couldn’t help but rake an appreciative eye over Wade’s svelte body.

“I think we should save that as an After Dark activity,” Wade said. “Unless you want Captain Star-Spangled Underpants watching.”

Steve blushed bright red as Tony grinned broadly at him. Natasha looked around. “We should get out of here before the press gets wind of what happened here.”

“What exactly did happen here?” Tony asked.

“You just witnessed the meeting of two soulmates,” Natasha said, while Helen checked on Clint. The man was blissfully unconscious and since Clint had shown no sign of concussion for once, Helen let him sleep.

Helen efficiently transferred Clint to a stretcher and Steve and Natasha each picked up a different end of it.

“It’s so funny that the universe paired me up with a doctor,” Wade said, getting up again. “I’m really robbing the cradle with you, huh?”

Helen froze, a lightbulb going off. Robbing the Cradle. She had been chasing the idea of speeding up healing processes with some kind of serum on and off for a few years, but nothing had ever come of it, but if she could -

Deadpool inserted his hand into hers. “Stop thinking about science,” he purred softly into her ear. “Or do I have to fuck you speechless.”

Steve Rogers went bright red as Helen laughed at her soulmate, unashamed. Kissing him quickly as they made their way back to the quinjet. Wade was definitely going to keep her on her toes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1400 words


	6. I Just Called (Clint/Skye)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, I was playing around with what could identify your soulmate. In this universe, instead of words, soulmates hear music when they meet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated, with love, to the extraordinary AlekWalker

Clint Barton hated the topic of soulmates. Since the beginning of time, when two soulmates met, the song that would best describe their relationship. As a child and teenager, he hadn’t thought twice about the idea, even dreaming of the day that he’d get to hear “their song” and meet his mate for life. When he had run away from foster care and joined the circus he had figured that he would meet his match, his mate, there, but he never heard the music.  
  
Then he had gone deaf and his world shattered. After doctors told him that he had lost 80% of his hearing and would need hearing aids the rest of his life, he wondered if he would ever get to hear the song. Without his aides, he could only ever hear loud noises and some ambient sounds, and even with them it was like hearing sound through a straw. But Clint was nothing if he not adaptable. He threw himself into work, dedicating himself to world-saving. He spent hours training in the shooting range training on every weapon imaginable when he wasn’t on-mission and what they said about him became undebatably true - he really was the world’s best marksman.  
  
His hard work paid off. He became a legend in SHIELD and became an Avenger. He forgot about the idea of having a soulmate. So when he was wheeled into the infirmary for the standard SHIELD post-debriefing once-over (okay, _maybe_ he had been stabbed in the leg, but it hadn’t been that deep!), Clint was shocked to hear the beginning notes from a guitar clearer than he had heard anything since his father had hit him as a child. He looked around at the empty room, There were a couple nurses, but it didn’t seem like they were noticing anything different.  
  
Then he heard it. A soft, pretty voice singing the same song that he heard. “No New Year's Day to celebrate, no chocolate-covered candy hearts to give away,” the voice was coming from behind a set of closed curtains. It wasn’t a bad voice, he thought as the voice hummed the song.  
  
Clint ripped the curtains open and saw the slight, brown-haired woman. Her eyes were gorgeous and - mercy did she look young. The girl - woman looked up and after a moment recognition set in, her eyes going wide and her whole body stiffening. She stopped singing.  
  
Clint picked up the tune stepping towards her. “I just called to say I love you. I just called to say how much I care. I just called to say I love you, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart.”  
  
The woman’s eyes widened further. “You can hear it…” she said softly. He didn’t hear that, his hearing aids hadn’t been in his ears, but he saw the lips move.   
  
“You’re my soulmate,” Clint said. He took a step forward and brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes and behind her ear.  
  
Tears formed on her face as one hand came up slowly to cover Clint’s (which it only did partially) and the other went down to her stomach as she struggled, painfully, to sit up.  
  
Clint stopped her, “what happened?” he said, his eyes grating over her body and zeroing in over the gauze on her stomach.   
  
The woman in front of him blushed and looked away from him. “I got shot,” she admitted. “On a mission.”  
  
Clint stiffened. Who in their right mind would send her out in the field? He’d seen Ops cadets that weren’t as green as this girl. “Promise me they’re dead,” Clint growled.  
  
“In SHIELD custody,” she said.  
  
Clint made an unhappy noise as he continued to stroke her hair. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”  
  
His mate finally found the button and did so, wincing. “Why are you sorry?” she said.   
  
Clint looked away. “I didn’t … you got _shot_ ,” he said. He needed to protect her. She was more precious than anything that he had ever been paid to retrieve or protect. She would never die on his watch.  
  
“Hey,” she reassured him, grabbing his hand. “I’m okay now. Nothing a couple weeks of bed rest won’t cure.”  
  
“I just… I… I can’t lose my soulmate when I just met them,” Clint said.  
  
“You won’t,” Skye said. Some instinct told her that her soulmate would never leave her. “Though I really need to know my soulmate’s name.”  
  
“I’m Clint. Clint Barton,” Clint said, sitting in a chair next to her. He couldn’t believe how lucky he was, or how beautiful and young his soulmate was.  
  
“Skye,” Skye said.”I, uh, don’t have a last name.” Her eyes suddenly widened in realization. “ _Hawkeye_?” she squeaked. “My soulmate is _Hawkeye_?”  
  
Clint chuckled at her. “It’s not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. I’m an old bastard that’s seen too much in my life to ever be considered normal. I’m the one who doesn’t deserve you. You’re so… innocent and beautiful.”  
  
Skye looked away. “I’m not at all innocent,” she said, looking away from Clint. She wanted to tell him about the massacre of her village, of growing up so alone that she joined the Rising Tide because they were the first group of people who gave her the time of day. “I was Rising Tide before SHIELD grabbed me.”  
  
“You were Rising Tide? The group behind all of those information releases?”  
  
“I’m… not wild about secrets,” Skye said. “I grew up an orphan in the foster system. The only record I have of where I came from is a single, redacted SHIELD document.” Skye looked away, but Clint saw the tears that threatened to spill over.  
  
Clint immediately slid into bed with her and enveloped her in his arms. “Oh Skye, no. I’m not judging you I promise. I _promise_. I couldn’t - I’ve done so much worse, trust me.”  
  
The door opened and Clint immediately rolled over Skye to cover her, agitated from everything that she had just told him.  
  
“Jesus Barton, no need to make the wounded sick on top of their injuries,” came Stark’s voice. Clint immediately relaxed, rolling off of Skye but staying in the bed.  
  
Clint winced in regret as Skye bit back a whimper of pain. “Ma’am, are you okay?” Steve asked.  
  
Skye breathed heavily for a moment while Clint checked under the gauze, confirming that no stitches had been torn. He was alarmed at the placement of the wounds, shocked that Skye was even alive right now. He tried to stomp down on the surge of protectiveness he felt.  
  
“Um, I’m fine,” Skye said, clearly overwhelmed. She looked so cute, the way that her cheeks and the tops of her ears went slightly red and she refused to make eye contact with the Avengers.  
  
“She’s cute, Barton,” Natasha said, immediately catching onto what was happening. “Perfect for you.” Clint sat up, rolling his eyes.   
  
“Butt out,” Clint said.  
  
“Is there something we’re missing?” Steve asked.  
  
“I’m his, uh, soulmate,” Skye said, starting to recover.  
  
“Another Agent of SHIELD?” Stark asked scathingly.  
  
Skye smirked. “Nah, I just consult with them. Decided to hitch a ride on the crazy plane with AC. Didn’t exactly plan on that getting me shot twice in the stomach though.”  
  
“I thought _I_ was SHIELD’s only consultant,” Stark pouted.  
  
“Clearly they needed a better hacker,” Skye bantered. Stark looked like he had been slapped. It was hysterical.  
  
A young brunette suddenly burst into the room, "hey Skye, Coulson says -" the brunette, who was English judging by the accent, froze, and so did every single Avenger in the room. It didn’t make sense, Coulson had been killed a year ago on the helicarrier by Loki. How was it that they were talking about him in the present tense?  
  
Natasha moved first. Her eyes like steel as she shoved the brunette into a wall. Clint stiffened himself and Skye grabbed his arm, trying to sit up, dividing Clint’s attention. “Is Coulson still alive?” Natasha demanded. “Tell me now.”  
  
Skye gave a little ‘oh’ and Clint glanced down, seeing the gauze on Skye’s stomach change from white to red. “Someone get a doctor!” Clint said in a panic. Someone hit a button and a nurse came in. She paled at the sight of Natasha holding Jemma against the wall, then turned her attention to Clint and Skye.   
  
“She’s bleeding,” Clint said, still panicked.  
  
“I’m fine,” Skye said tightly.  
  
“What part of ‘two weeks of bed rest’ and ‘don’t move’ don’t you understand?” The nurse chastised “You should be dead,” she gave Skye a Look. “I’ll get an intern to come and stitch you back up,” she said finally, looking at the wound. “It looks like you just popped a stitch.”  
  
“What the hell is going on in here?” said a voice at the doorway. Everyone except the nurse froze again. Clint turned and looked at the man in the doorway, just like everyone else in the room. Phil Coulson paled, realizing who was in the room. “Oh. This is going to take explaining.”  
  
“Told you that you should have told them,” came another voice. Melinda May, Clint knew immediately.   
  
“Barton, what the hell are you doing in my Agent’s bed?” Coulson snapped. Clint’s eyes widened. The way Coulson said ‘Agent’, Clint was almost positive what Coulson really meant to say was ‘daughter’.  
  
“He’s my soulmate AC,” Skye said. Coulson went gray.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1,572 words


	7. Dear Jane (Steve/Jane/Bucky)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jane breaks up with Thor and in doing so finds her soulmates.

Steve hadn’t initially intended to hang around the Tower for more than a few hours after the Chitauri attacked New York, but the cleanup and recovery took a good deal longer than that. He felt responsible for what happened and couldn’t help but console those who were grieving, and help in any way SHIELD would allow him.  
  
A full 48-hours after aliens attacked New York, it had been 72 hours since he had had a decent night’s rest. Stark had pointed him towards a room in the tower that had been left undamaged in the battle, but he must have taken a wrong turn because he found himself in front of a lab that had a gorgeous woman working tirelessly and with laser-like focus within it.  
  
The door opened by itself (something Steve was still getting used to) and Steve felt compelled to move forward, all the while staring at the woman in front of him. She was absolutely gorgeous. Steve couldn’t help but frown at the dark circles under her eyebrows.  
  
“He left me a Dear Jane letter, can you believe it? That’s it. I’m done with men!”  
  
Steve froze. Those words had appeared on his hip some time while he was in the ice. All he knew is that he had awoken and they were scrawled messily there. He stared at the woman. He knew his soulmate would be dealing with a breakup when he met them, and he didn’t want to say the wrong thing to give the woman the wrong idea. He wouldn’t rush her. God, he would never rush her. He wanted her to allow her heart to mend before falling in love again. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too much to ask for them to spend a little time getting to know each other during that time as well.  
  
The woman glanced up and froze as well. “Oh. You’re not Darcy. You’re Captain America,” she said, wide-eyed, but still bent over her work.  
  
“I've dreamed of meeting my soulmate for nearly a hundred years.” Steve said breathlessly. “You don't do my dreams justice." Steve winced. He hadn’t intended to sound so ridiculously cheesy.  
  
The woman shot straight up, and Steve rushed forward, catching her just before she hit her head on a piece of equipment hanging precariously over her workspace, pulling her into his arms. She laughed once she initially got over her shock. "Well you're the best-looking nonagenarian I'll ever meet, thank God!" Steve blushed and righted the woman. “When I was born with my soulwords, we were all afraid that I was going to lose my soulmate early in our relationship or I wasn’t going to meet them until the end of my own life.”  
  
Steve’s own eyes widened as he realized that the context of his words had probably sounded horrible. “I’m so sorry ma’am,” Steve said. “I’m Steve Rogers, by the way. Captain America is for the press. I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.”  
  
“Jane Foster. I’m from London,” Jane said. Steve’s eyebrows furrowed together. There were traces of an accent, but she sounded pretty American. “My mother was British and my father was American. I came over to the states to live with him and finish High School and go to college. I got bullied a little for the accent, so I dropped it pretty quick.”  
  
“I’d like to hear it some time,” Steve said. “I got a thing for pretty English girls.”  
  
“So I’ve heard…” Jane said with a knowing smile.  
  
Steve blushed. “The press makes half of that stuff up,” he said timidly.  
  
“Oh, no, these are stories I grew up on,” Jane said. “My father and my great uncle both said that they knew you pretty well.”  
  
“Oh?” Steve asked, his interest piqued.  
  
Jane nodded. “I don’t… advertise it. My mother never married my father, so I have her name, but … my father was Tim Dugan and my great uncle was James Falsworth.”  
  
“Your father was Dum Dum Dugan?” Steve asked, shocked.  
  
Jane nodded. “Dad met Mom when Great Uncle Jim invited him to a family event. They fell in love, but Dad wasn’t the marrying type. I moved to the states so I could stay close to him when he got older. He died just after I graduated from Undergrad.” Both of them gained a pained look, each with their own separate memories of the man. “He loved me, though. Taught me everything that I knew. Taught me about his hero, a man who always pushed for the truth, unwavering in his efforts to do what was right and be one of the good guys.” Jane smiled at Steve. “When I got accepted into the PhD program at Oxford for Astrophysics, he told me, ‘find the truth. Whatever you do in life, find the truth, just like Steve did.’”  
  
Steve’s face, from his forehead down, was bright pink. “He was a good man.” He stared down at his beautiful soulmate. Steve had heard of her from Thor. Come to think of it, the Asgardian had given him several mournful looks. Was it possible that Thor knew that Steve was Jane’s mate?  
  
“I know that you just had a bad break up,” Steve stammered. “I wouldn’t want to … I mean I know you and Thor…”  
  
“I’m fine with taking things slow,” Jane cut in with a soft smile. “I hope you don’t mind that I was in a relationship before…”  
  
“Given my words, I had a feeling,” Steve said. “We did have Dear John letters back in the 40s. I had a friend who received one during the war.”  
  
Jane winced. “I’m alright,” she said softly.  
  
“If you ever want to talk, I’m here for you,” Steve said as calmly as he could manage. “That’s what soulmates are for.”  
  
So they took things slow. Steve didn’t mind - they had time. Steve had a little down time because of the Battle of New York. They took walks in the park, listened to jazz music while Steve drew and Jane studied the stars, and went to the movies. It was a little fascinating to watch Jane fall out of “what could have been” with Thor and into love with him as Steve. Darcy complained good-naturedly that she had yet another single-minded person to take care of, but she quickly changed her tune when she discovered that Steve not only had an off-switch, but he also was able to get Jane to quit working and take regular breaks.  
  
Jane had then been called back home regarding her studies on the Einstein-Rosen bridge and since Steve had missions to run out of Washington for SHIELD, he couldn’t go with her, but when he received the report that she had disappeared, he rushed to London to look for her. Darcy filled him in on everything that had happened and Steve couldn't help the fear and rage he felt bubbling inside him. It wasn't that he didn't trust Jane and Thor, but the idea that he couldn't be there for his mate fed his fighter nature.  
  
When Greenwich was all but destroyed and the Dark Elves defeated, Thor returned Jane to Steve with a respectful nod. Steve nodded back before wrapping an exhausted Jane in his arms, inhaling her scent as she sobbed in his arms.  
  
Returning to the quarters SHIELD had assigned Steve, the mated pair slept together, then _slept together._ The illusion of them having endless days together had been destroyed and neither of them wanted to spend time apart any more.

\---------

  
Bucky had Steve pinned and there was a glint of recognition. Steve arched into his mate, kissing him hard. When he broke away, Bucky stared at Steve, stunned. “Steve?” He asked. “What… I thought you were smaller.”  
  
“I joined the army,” Steve responded almost automatically.  
  
Bucky's face crumpled. “They made me do it, Steve. I couldn't move. I could only watch as… oh my God I could have killed my own mate.”  
  
“Let's get out of here and I'll introduce you to our third,” Steve said. The next second, the steel beam below them gave way and both of them plummeted into the Potomac.  
  
Natasha was shocked to find Bucky crouching over Steve when she found them on the shoreline several hours later. She raised both of her guns and pointed them at him. What shocked Natasha more was that Bucky moved to put his body between Natasha and Steve, shielding him.  
  
“Barnes?” Natasha asked slowly.  
  
He had since taken off his mask and his outer layer, putting the extra clothes over Steve to keep him warmer. If not for the hand that glinted silver, he almost looked normal - certainly nothing like the Winter Soldier. Bucky looked at her with shame-filled eyes. “It’s all my fault. I should have helped him more. I… he’s my soulmate.”  
  
Natasha took a step towards them and Bucky stiffened on instinct. Natasha raised both her hands so that Bucky could see she was unarmed. “It’s okay, Yasha, I just want help him. It looks pretty bad from here. Can we take him to a hospital to have him checked over?”  
  
The name rang a bell, but Bucky shook his head. “They could be HYDRA. Anyone could be HYDRA,” he intoned. “Can’t trust them.”  
  
Natasha took another two steps forward, “can you trust me?” she asked.  
  
Bucky sat still for a full three seconds, staring at Natasha. He remembered her from before. She called him Yasha, that was right. She had been… kind. Finally he nodded, to Natasha’s great relief. She discreetly sent JARVIS a message that they’d need to be picked up. Clint had been waiting for Natasha’s call with a Stark quinjet waiting When Clint came, Natasha couldn’t help but feel sympathy for Bucky, who kept switching between looking like a trapped animal and a mama bear.  
  
He stiffened when Clint approached with the gurney, protecting Steve again with his body. Clint’s eyes went wide when he saw Bucky. “They’re soulmates, Clint. HYDRA brainwashed him. This is James Buchanan Barnes.”  
  
If it was possible, Clint’s eyes went wider. They were filled with understanding rather than pity though, which Bucky appreciated. “You look like you took quite the beating too,” Clint finally said. “Maybe we should get you checked over as well.”  
  
Bucky stiffened, instinctively knowing what that meant within HYDRA. Clint winced at his verbal slip. “Don’t like hospitals, huh?” Clint asked casually. “A man after my own heart.”  
  
Bucky tentatively assisted with loading Steve onto the gurney. Once they were loaded into the Quinjet, he sat at Steve’s head tensely watchful of every movement.  
  
He refused to move, even after Doctor Cho nearly stripped to show Bucky she had no weapons on her. Eventually, they let Bucky sit where he was. He refused to let anyone touch him, several of his wounds from the fall off the helicarrier oozing blood.  
  
Natasha went back to retrieve Sam and by the time they returned, Steve and Bucky had been placed in a recovery cubicle. Bucky shifted anxiously from foot to foot as his gaze switched from Steve to Sam and back. All desire to hate Bucky for all his crimes as the Winter Soldier had gone out the window when Sam met the man and realized that, among other things, he had the worst case of PTSD that Sam had ever seen.  
  
So they sat and talked while Sam played Jazz standards in the background allowing for the mood in the room to be as nervous and untrusting as Bucky obviously felt. The uneasy tension in the room was broken when the door was flung open. A gorgeous brunette burst through and gave a strangled cry when she spotted Steve. Bucky and Sam both got up.  
  
“He’s going to be okay, Jane,” Sam said, reassuring her.  
  
Jane turned to Bucky. “I love him,” she said.  
  
His other words. Bucky stared at her stammering silently for a second before finding his words. “I know. Maybe you can learn to love me too?”


	8. Never Let You Go (Bucky/Skye)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set between Season 2 and 3, HYDRA tries to capture Skye and her soulmate rescues her

All her life, Daisy had the most curious soulwords stamped on her ass. _I’ve got you. If they come back I’ll kill them._ It made the other girls giggle when they saw it, and the nuns frown. Some of the nuns believed that placement of a soulmark said a lot about who you were as a person. A soulmark on your ass was nearly as bad as a couple of the orphans who had two soulmarks. One had three - she was lucky enough to be adopted by a soulmate quad shortly after she arrived.   
  
Without any information on her parents and her past, Daisy latched on to the words. She had a future. Someone out there would be there for her. She became a girl obsessed with the topic. As she got older, she searched soulmate forums, looking to see if she could match the handwriting some people posted there to match a soulmate.   
  
But she got black-bagged, joined SHIELD, and the world fell apart. Then she got powers, met her parents, and her world fell apart in an entirely different way. May left and Coulson became this entirely different _person_ that Daisy didn’t know any more. So here Daisy sat on the balcony overlooking the hanger, staring out at everyone and wondering if she would ever belong anywhere. Her soulmark was the only reminder that she ever got that maybe, just maybe, she’d find someone and _maybe_ they wouldn’t leave her.  
  
“Skye,” Coulson called from his office.   
  
Daisy crossed the hallway into Coulson’s office. “Daisy,” she corrected.  
  
“Sorry?” Coulson asked, his eyebrows knitting together.  
  
“I decided to go by Daisy. My parents named me it so I might as well,” Daisy said. “Skye was only my hacker handle anyway.”  
  
“Okay,” Coulson said slowly. “Anyway, I need you, Mack, and Hunter to head to New York. We’re getting reports of an unidentified person or persons with possible super strength and we were hoping you’d check it out.  
  
“First candidate on my Project Caterpillar list, coming right up!” Daisy said excitedly.   
  
“Quinjet’s leaving in one hour!” Coulson said. Daisy nodded and rushed off to get mission-ready.  
  
\---------  
  
The mission brought them out to an abandoned factory in Brooklyn. The report was that there was a man living there. Daisy wandered the building while Mack and Hunter checked the perimeter. She closed her eyes, feeling the thrum of the building and the people on the street. She tried to search for the man that they were looking for and thought that she had honed in on him when soldiers burst through the door. Daisy immediately shifted to fighter stance as a large number of people burst into every door and window. She cursed herself for not being more aware of her surroundings as she used the vibrations in the air to take out the first wave of attackers.  
  
She tried to grab at her com, but it was ripped away from her. She held out her hands and blew the guy backwards. She didn’t see the gunshot coming, but felt it before she heard it as the force rammed through her shoulder.  
  
“Hail HYDRA,” one said. She felt someone grab her arms and wretch them behind her back. He gave her a hungry, predatory look before Daisy kneed him in the balls. He growled at her and hit her in the head.   
  
“What are we gonna do with her,” someone asked. The room swam as she tried to get her bearings after the blow to her head.  
  
“She’s pretty,” someone else noted. _Oh god, no_ , she thought.  
  
“Nah, boss wants this one to himself,” another said. Dazed, she was dragged backwards, her bonds secured to the wall and a bag shoved over her head. She heard a scuffle happening behind the door as she tried her best to quake her cuffs off.  
  
The scuffling grew louder. She tensed, unsure of what was coming. One arm was now useless, her shoulder almost completely covered in blood.  She stumbled, then fell, still chained to the wall, arms tied agonisingly up behind her.  
  
“I got thirteen,” somebody said.  
  
Someone else groaned. “I never should have let Stark show you that movie.”  
  
“You only knocked out ten,” the first said. “Sore loser.”  
  
Barely registering the words, Daisy rallied, standing and preparing to fight again, despite being chained to the wall and sightless. “If you’re HYDRA, I’m not going down without a fight,” she spat at the second man.  
  
“We’re not HYDRA,” he replied, his voice quiet, soothing and even. He approached her cautiously and removed the hood then broke the cuffs off the wall. The blonde hair and blue eyes of the man finally registered. Captain Rogers. The first Avenger. She was safe. She looked at the other man and saw dark hair and blue eyes. She knew him from the reports on when SHIELD fell. The Winter Soldier. They were working together. Except that didn’t make sense. Was she delirious?  
  
Daisy swayed and the man who looked like the Winter Soldier caught her as she fell. “Please don’t leave,” Daisy said. “They’ll come back.”  
  
The dark-haired man’s eyes shot wide open, and he shared a look with Rogers, who immediately started putting pressure bandages around her shoulder.   
  
“I’ve got you,” he whispered, holding onto her firmly. “If they come back, I’ll kill them.”  
  
“Soulmate?” Daisy said, fighting not to fall asleep. She was so tired.  
  
“I’m Bucky,” Bucky said. He put an arm under her knees and one around, lifting her and walking her swiftly … somewhere. Captain America had a friend named Bucky, but he was dead. It was all very confusing.  
  
“‘m Skye,” she said softly, closing her eyes.  
  
Bucky jostled her, causing her to suck in a breath and open her eyes wide. “Stay with us, Skye,” Bucky said. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”  
  
“‘m Daisy now,” she said. “My father killed my mother. Coulson made him forget…” Steve paused and stared at her.  
  
“Phil Coulson?” Steve asked in shock.  
  
“Didn’t he die?” Bucky asked Steve.  
  
“He came back,” Daisy said tiredly, closing her eyes again. She winced as Bucky jostled her. “No biggie. I came back too. Go’shot an’then came back.”  
  
Steve opened a door and she saw sky and heard a helicopter. Her hair flew in every direction as they rushed her towards… what she wasn’t sure. Maybe she was in the helicopter? “What happened?” someone else said.  
  
“Mack?” Daisy asked faintly. “Hunter?”   
  
“We’re here, Tremors,” Mack said from somewhere above her as she was laid on a gurney. “Hunter was a dumb-ass and ended up breaking his leg, but we’re fine.  
  
“She’s delirious,” Bucky said. “Keeps talking about people coming back from the dead.”  
  
“Died last time I got shot,” Daisy slurred. “Two t’the stomach… bang bang.” she winced as she felt a pinch to her arm.  
  
“I got some O negative in here,” came the voice. Another pinch to her other arm.  
  
“Jesus. Did she put her shoulder through a blender?” Mack asked. Skye’s head lolled to the side as the darkness pulled her under.  
  
When she woke up again, she was  in a medical facility. She lay somewhere between sleep and waking, her body not wanting to move as she listened to what was going on around her. It took her a minute to realize that it wasn’t the SHIELD medical bay she was used to. She tried to get up but someone held her down. Her right arm was in a sling and her shoulder encased in some serious gauze. There was an IV in her left hand and there was a blood pressure cuff on her left arm.  
  
She looked up and saw Bucky sitting next to her. “You scared the shit out of me, doll.”   
  
Daisy tried to speak, but realized that there was an oxygen mask over her face. It took her a couple of tries to put her hand to the mask to remove it. “What happened?” she rasped.  
  
“The bullet severed a vein in your shoulder,” Bucky said. “You lost nearly a liter and a half of blood before we could get you help. You could have died.”  
  
Daisy started making connections in her head, recognizing that face from the history photos she had always been so obsessed with. the nose and jawline and eyes were all the same, though the eyes were much more troubled. “You’re Bucky Barnes,” she said suddenly. Then she spotted the metal arm. It wasn’t a dream. The Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes were the same person.  
  
Bucky stiffened. “Yes,” he said slowly.   
  
Daisy didn’t take her eyes off of his arm. Somehow HYDRA must have gotten a hold of him. They had never found his body in the Alps after he’d fallen from the train. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. Bucky stiffened further, prepared to leave, rejected. “I’m sorry they did that to you. I can’t… I’m so sorry they did that to you.” Bucky stared, frozen. Daisy blushed, looking down at the blankets. Unsure how to explain, even to her soulmate, that she knew a thing or two about finding out you’d been made into a weapon for evil.   
  
She winced as she scooted to the side in her bed, but continued to do so until there was room for Bucky. His eyebrows went up to his hairline when she patted the space beside her. He sat down cautiously, then lay on his side, putting her oxygen mask back on her. Her soul sang louder as the distance between them closed until her nose was pressed up against his chest.   
  
“Rest, doll,” Bucky said as he stroked her hair. “We’ll discuss the ‘coming back from the dead’ thing later.”   
  
Someone came in and injected something into her IV. She felt Bucky sit up a little and watch them. She knew her soulmate would watch out for her. She fell asleep again, somehow having faith that Bucky would never leave her alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1,659 words


	9. Heart and Soul (Darcy/Thor)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Continued from Chapter 6 - Steve/Jane/Bucky, Darcy and Thor realize that they're meant to be

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter entertains the idea that Asgardians have to touch before meeting. Occurs before Thor 2 takes place, so that whole thing is null.

Darcy couldn’t help but acknowledge that Jane looked really happy with her two soulmates now that they had completed the bond. It was taking Bucky a while to return to his former self, even with the bond breaking HYDRA’s brainwashing, but he was getting there.   
  
To everyone’s shock, a very much alive Phil “Stole my iPod” Coulson had shown up and interviewed Bucky over the course of several days not long after. Bucky had been so affected by the interview, Jane had actually left the lab for three solid days after Coulson had finished (an unprecedented event).  
  
Darcy smiled as Thor came over and sat down next to her. Darcy stared wide-eyed at the accepting expression on Thor’s face. “You knew, didn’t you,” Darcy said, realizing.  
  
Thor nodded. “When I met the Captain I knew that they would find each other. She is an intriguing Midgardian and I could not help but get to know her.”  
  
“I’m sure she’ll understand,” Darcy said. “You can just ask her to be friends.”  
  
Thor blushed, “There are those within the courts of Asgard who believe that it is not becoming for the future King to have many female friends,” he said.   
  
Darcy frowned. “So I’m not your friend? I feel the love, Thunderdome.”  
  
“You are… Darcy,” Thor said. “You felled me with lightning when I first arrived on Midgard as a mortal. Few would be so brave.”  
  
“Hey Thor? Can I ask you… how come you never call me ‘Lady’ or by any title?”  
  
Thor froze. “I had not thought of it. I suppose because I do not see you as one who is ever a stranger. From the time I met you, you seemed… familiar.”  
  
Darcy forced a smile. “Right back acha, buddy,” she said, bro-punching Thor in the arm. The pain of them connecting skin-to-skin made Darcy shriek loudly as she collapsed. Thor ignored his own pain to catch her before she hit the floor.  
  
Thor couldn’t help but stare at the red and silver pattern that emerged onto the buxom woman’s fingers that stretched from the knuckles to the middle joint. Steve, Bucky, and Jane had rushed over at the shriek that Darcy had emitted, closely followed by Natasha, Clint, and Tony.   
  
“Jesus, Point Break, what have we told you about breaking the interns?” Tony quipped.  
  
Jane frowned deeply as she attempted to shove Thor off of Darcy. “What did you do, Thor?”  
  
Thor curled around Darcy, immovably. “I have waited for her for over a millenia,” Thor breathed. “My soulmate.”  
  
"I don't understand," Darcy said, blinking as Thor helped her sit up. "Why would I be your soulmate? I don't understand science. Not like Jane. She can literally bridge the divide between Asgard and Earth."  
  
Thor chuckled and Darcy couldn't help but feel a thrill as his chest rumbled with it so close to hers. "Lady Jane does understand the science, Darcy, but you understand hearts. And that is far more important." He tucked a stray hair behind her ear, a look of admiration on his face before pulling her to her feet. “Come, we must away to Asgard to present you before the Allfather.”  
  
Darcy pulled away from him, “What?” she asked uneasily.  
  
“I must bring you to Asgard,” Thor said. “We must prepare to wed.”   
  
“ _What_?” Darcy howled. Her entire jaw clenched as her other muscles began to tighten.  
  
Thor paused and looked at Darcy, his eyebrows furrowed. “You do not wed immediately after meeting your soulmate?” he asked.  
  
“God no!” Darcy exclaimed. “Certainly not before the first kiss, and often times you’re not physically compatible with your soulmates or something else happens.”  
  
“Like you get exposed to Gamma radiation, manage not to die, and you’re soulmate rejects you,” Stark said. Bruce breathed deeply as his jaw tightened. Darcy was breathing quickly, panicked.  
  
“It wasn’t like that,” Bruce said quietly.  
  
“Her father tried to kidnap you,” Tony countered.  
  
“Look. I can’t…” Darcy started, tears in her eyes. “I can’t…” she tried again. Then she locked eyes with Thor. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, then bolted.  
  
Almost immediately the sky became overcast as rain poured down while Thor’s face simultaneously crumpled. “I’ll go talk to her,” Clint said as Jane sat next to where Thor had fallen to his knees.  
  
“Don’t worry, Thor. She’ll come around,” Jane said.  
  
“She has rejected me,” Thor said.  
  
“What?” Jane asked, eyes widening. “Thor, no! Not at all!”  
  
“But she ran away,” he pointed out.  
  
“Yeah, but… I mean… she’s been unmarked up until now,” Jane said defensively. “Only about 2% of the population is unmarked. It couldn’t have been easy growing up.”  
  
The sky cleared a little, but Thor remained on the floor, looking heartbroken. “I do not understand,” Thor said.  
  
Jane looked uncomfortable. “I mean… look, it’s a ridiculous, old-school thought and it’s completely unfounded but -”  
  
Steve placed a calming hand on Jane’s shoulder, crouching down to their level. “Some people on Earth believe that if you don’t have a mark, you don’t have a soul.”  
  
“At the very least, she probably thought she’d spend her entire life alone,” Natasha noted, rubbing her own words unconsciously. “Darcy loves everyone freely, likely because she had no guarantee that anyone would love her.”  
  
Thor immediately got up and ran after Darcy after hearing Natasha. When he found Darcy, she was sobbing in Clint's arms. He could smell the terror and pain that was rolling off of his soulmate and his heart ached. Clint passed Darcy off to Thor easily; she was sobbing so hard that it seemed to him a miracle she was still breathing.  
  
“This is right, my Darcy,” Thor said calmly as he held her. “The Fates have destined us together. Do not fret so.” Slowly, Darcy’s sobs quieted.  
  
“I have…” she looked down and spotted her marks. She froze and traced the gold and silver swirls, fascinated  
  
“When I was born without any marks, no one was really worried. It’s common to be a few years apart,” Darcy said quietly. “With each passing birthday, my parents got more and more worried. Not that many on Earth have soulmates that are ten years younger than them. Even fewer have soulmates 15 years apart. By the time I was 20 they had resigned to the fact that I didn’t have a mate. By the time New Mexico came around…” she shrugged. “I figured I could love the world since I didn’t have a soulmate to love.  A tiny percentage of the population has soulmates beyond that, and then there are those who are unmarked their entire lives. I only know of one person that Natasha worked with who has marks twenty years younger than him, but she only found out accidentally and he made her promise not to say anything. Then there’s the two percent that go their entire lives without ever meeting their soulmate.”  
  
“I am sorry. There was once a time when Asgardians occasionally found that Midgardians were their mates, but Odin decreed that we were interfering in the planet’s development. There are a couple on Asgard still who came from Midgard.”  
  
Darcy let out a choked laugh. “You know, there’s a legend within Norse and Greek myths that the unmarked are meant to be the soulmates of the gods. It’s laughed at these days. The kind of thing that Fox News uses when an unmarked makes the news, usually for committing suicide. The press is going to have a field day with this one. I hope all the cheerleaders from High School choke on their words. They teased me every single day of high school for being unmarked. Sydney Marks was too, but she got her soulmark two days after her fifteenth birthday Sophomore year.”  
  
“I am sorry that life was such a challenge for you because of me,” Thor said, bowing his head slightly. “How can I compensate you?”  
  
Darcy tilted her head upwards, her eyes challenging and defiant. “Kiss me,” she demanded.  
  
“Aye,” Thor said with a smile, “I can do that.” He bent down and kissed her passionately. Darcy was tentative at first, but soon was matching Thor in his enthusiasm. As they parted, Thor smiled. “Still think we are not destined to be together?”   
  
Darcy bit her lip. “I think I need another kiss to be sure,” she said.  
  
“Little minx,” Thor rumbled with a smile, but acquiesced to her request. A while later, they sat curled together as Darcy stared at the the swirling pattern on her knuckles that corresponded with the swirling pattern on Thor’s bicep.  
  
“I thought I’d live my entire life alone,” she said quietly. “The Avengers are a lot more progressive on the subject of the Unmarked than a lot of people. I thought I was lucky to be living here, but to actually find out that I have a soulmate…” Tears began to well up in Darcy’s eyes again as Thor’s heart ached for his mate. He held her slightly tighter.  
  
“My mother has been waiting for my soulmate for nearly 1600 years. She has oft said that she could not wait to have a daughter,” Thor explained. “I suppose I am eager to be wed as I have waited for so long. There are other benefits. Asgard will become stable knowing that once the Allfather steps down from being king, the royal line will continue.”  
  
Darcy suddenly became very aware of the fact that someday she would be Queen of an entire people and would probably live a life far longer than she had ever thought that she would. She tried to picture loving and being loved by Thor for an eternity. The tears slipped down her face. She knew on some instinct that Thor would be devoted for her for a literal eternity. “Okay,” she said a little shakily. “Okay, I’ll come with you to Asgard.”  
  
Thor leaned his forehead against hers. “What have I done that warrants my deserving you, sweet Darcy?”  
  
“Probably something that the Warriors Three will tell them if I ask,” Darcy giggled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1,672 words.


	10. In a Gym in Brooklyn (Skye/Steve)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set before the world even knows Steve Rogers is, before the Avengers are even formed, a girl named Skye met a boy named Steve in a gym in Brooklyn.

It was one of those nights that Skye couldn’t sleep. These nights had come and gone over the years, she would be thinking about her parents - nightmares about her life in foster care, a hacking problem, or even how Miles kept wanting to sleep with her. They hadn’t met in person yet and Skye was already beginning to cave to his flirtatious cajoling. She hadn’t been laid in a year. Regardless of the reason why she couldn’t sleep, tonight she was struggling more than she normally did. Giving up on sleep, she sighed and got out of her new used van that she had just purchased. She locked it back up to keep the hobos out and started walking. She had _some_ confidence that it wouldn’t be stolen - it was after all pretty old; although she had parked in Brooklyn, so she couldn’t be sure of anything.  
  
She walked down different streets, trying to tire herself out. Some unknown force (probably the tequila shots that a random guy had bought her at the bar a few blocks away) pulled her into a boxing gym that was open and empty.  
  
Skye walked in and stepped up to a punching bag that was hanging up. She punched it testingly and it swung a little. Having no idea what she was doing, yet kind of enjoying herself, she punched it again. Then she punched it twice in a row. Between the alcohol buzz and the rhythm of the bag, Skye soon found herself distracted from everything running around in her brain.  
  
“Are you alright, ma’am?” came a voice.  
  
Skye growled internally. Her soulwords. Now her night was perfect. It was amazing to her how many times she had heard those words in her life. Normally she was polite about that sort of thing, however at two am in Brooklyn, she had no patience for it.  "You know, if I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I wouldn't be living out of a van right now,” she snapped, turning around.  
  
The blonde-haired, blue-eyed man standing in the doorway stood frozen, staring at her with huge eyes. “My soulmate,” he said softly. He strode across the room with unbelievable speed before Skye could register the reaction. It had finally happened. _Her_ soulmate had found her. Someone that fate promised wouldn’t leave her. He grabbed her hands and she hissed. “God, you didn’t wrap your hands?”  
  
Skye looked down at her hands and saw that they were raw and bleeding. “Oh. I, uh, guess I didn’t. Is it really you?” she asked. The man lifted his shirt to reveal her first words to him in her handwriting. Words that were etched over the most perfect six-pack that Skye had ever seen. She had a hard time dragging her eyes away, but looked up at him. “That’s my handwriting,” Skye said faintly.  
  
“Come on, let’s get you bandaged up,” he said, leading her over to a bench. Skye was starting to feel the effects of the punching bag as she glanced at the clock and noticed that she had been in the gym for nearly an hour. “And then I’m taking you home.”  
  
That broke Skye’s concentration. “What?” she asked.  
  
“Can’t have my best girl living out of a van,” he said with a smile that was sure making her melt like butter. “I’m Steve, by the way.”  
  
“Skye,” Skye said as Steve pulled out the First Aid kit.  
  
Steve tested Skye’s hands and she hissed at the pressure he applied. “Well, you got lucky, Skye.” Steve said in a worried tone. “It doesn’t look like anything’s broken. Honestly, what were you thinking?”  
  
Skye hissed while Steve applied antiseptic to her knuckles. “Honestly, I’ve never boxed before. I couldn’t sleep so I was out wandering and ended up here.”  
  
Steve smiled that butter-melting smile again. “I felt the same thing a few weeks ago when I found this place,” he said. “There’s something magical about it, that’s for sure.” He set to bandaging her knuckles. Skye felt a tug from the bond starting to take ahold and between that, the punching bag, the late hour, and the alcohol, she listed, smiling faintly.  
  
Steve caught her before she fell and rearranged them so he could sit beside her and support her while he worked. She closed her eyes, breathing him in. Maybe she _could_ go home with him, just for one night. After all, she was pretty sure Steve wasn’t going to let her stay in her van alone and it would be a little bit of a struggle to fit him inside.  
  
“Rogers?” came another voice. Steve was just finishing her bandages and Skye awakened a little as Steve’s body shifted subtly to look up at the person coming into the room. “She okay?”  
  
A tall, african-american man dressed all in black with an eyepatch and an air of danger had entered the room. Steve seemed to know him, but Skye couldn’t help but tense up. “She didn’t wrap her hands,” Steve told the man.  
  
He paused looking between the two. “You two on a date?” he asked.  
  
Sleep tugged at Skye again. “Soulmates,” Steve said. “We just met.”  
  
“Living out of a van?” the man asked.  
  
“I’m rectifying the situation,” Steve said protectively.  
  
Suddenly, Skye made the connection and her eyes flew open. “Hold on, Steve _Rogers_?” she asked shocked. Her soulmate was _Captain freaking America_? She looked at him hard. Now that she knew, he looked exactly like he had in the history films they had shown in middle school, and the pictures were dead on. “ _The_ Steve Rogers? How is that even possible?”  
  
“We found him frozen in the ice two months ago,” the man in black said. “I’m Director Nick Fury, with SHIELD.”  
  
“Skye,” Skye said, feeling very aware that she was talking to the director of an agency she hacked a little over a year ago. She wondered if he knew who she was. Both men looked at her expectantly. “Uh, no last name. Skye isn’t actually even my first name. I’m an orphan. Have been all my life.”  
  
For a second, Skye thought she saw something in Fury’s eye, though the next moment thought she must have imagined it. Steve, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to pile blankets on top of her and find all the ways that would make her feel better. Skye blushed at the stray thought of the kinds of things that Steve could do to her to make her feel better.  
  
“We need you,” Fury said to Steve after a moment. “We have a mission.” Skye listed again, interested in the conversation, but getting so very tired.  
  
Steve nodded. “Do you have a file? I should get her settled in my apartment and it’s pretty late.”  
  
Fury stared at the two of them for a moment while Skye closed her eyes and leaned against Steve. Some not-small part of her brain panicking because she had never in her life been able to trust anyone so easily, some other not-small part of her brain told the first part of her brain to shut up.  
  
She must have dozed off, because the next thing she knew, Fury was gone and Steve was shaking her gently. “Come on doll, let’s get you home,” Steve said. Skye’s eyes went wide as she froze.  
  
It took Steve mere moments to notice. “Doll, are you okay? You don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”  
  
“I’ve never had one before,” Skye admitted.  
  
“What?” Steve asked, eyebrows knotted together in clear confusion.  
  
“A home…” she didn’t even realize the words had slipped out until they were already out there. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She had convinced herself that the van was home, but it wasn’t. Not really.  
  
Steve pressed her against his body and wrapped her in his arms.”You have a home now,” he said softly.

  
**********

Steve didn’t know what else to say. Growing up in the 30s, everyone had a hard life. There was never enough of anything to go around. Then when he had woken up after being “thawed” and seen the soulwords, he thought the universe had matched him with someone who had had an equally hard life. Never had he imagined how meeting his mate would make him realize how blessed he truly was. To never know his name or his parents… to never have a _home_ … he promised himself that Skye would want for nothing from this point forward.  
  
They walked back to his apartment and Skye blushed at the King-sized bed that Steve had. “I can take the couch,” Steve said, passing her one of his shirts. “You’re dead on your feet.”  
  
“Yeah…” Skye breathed. Skye walked into the bathroom and came back out, moments later wearing his shirt. Steve’s pants suddenly felt very tight and if not for the fact that Skye was ready to fall over, Steve knew that he’d have a much harder time resisting her. As it was, Steve couldn’t resist keeping her in his line of sight while he read.  
  
So Steve settled into a chair while Skye settled under her covers. Once she was asleep, his hearing picking up on the way her breathing evened out, he moved the chair closer to her. He read about how Howard had recovered the Tesseract and they had been studying it for years. Steve cursed. Nothing good had come from that. They had almost lost to the Axis powers because of it, then Howard had pulled it out of where it had been good and buried and now _SHIELD_ was studying it? Now this alien, Loki, had it. He didn’t want to leave his soulmate, but he knew he really didn’t have a choice.  
  
He woke Skye the next morning and only parted when she eagerly reassured him that she wouldn’t leave and would be there when he returned. He gave her the copy of the key to his apartment, then sped off to meet Fury. When Thor had brought up his soulmate, Jane, who SHIELD had apparently transferred to a remote location, Steve couldn’t help but look curiously at Agent Hill, who nodded in confirmation that she knew.  
  
“We’re keeping it out of official documentation for now,” Maria said quietly when he strolled over near her. “We’re sure that Loki’s unaware of her, but we’re keeping an eye on her, regardless. Plus, we’re nowhere near New York, I promise.”  
  
Steve still wasn’t happy with the idea that Skye was left alone - even with the fate of the world in the balance. It had been simple in the 40s. You met your soulmate, you bonded, and you started your family. Meeting a soulmate in the new era was a maze even without SHIELD and aliens and … he suddenly realized that he had no idea how one courted a soulmate in the modern era.  
  
He couldn’t ask Hill. Some instinct told him that it would be crossing a line. He couldn’t ask Stark - he would never get a serious answer out of him. His one-person fan club might pass out if he asked him a direct question. Fury probably wouldn’t answer him and he couldn’t ask Dr. Banner without Stark overhearing. Landing on who to ask, he found Natasha cleaning her guns. “Agent Romanoff, can I ask you a question?”  
  
“You just did,” Romanoff replied shortly, reminding him of Colonel Phillips. “You can ask me another.”  
  
“How… does one court a soulmate these days?” Steve asked.  
  
Romanoff smirked. “This about the girl in that gym in Brooklyn?” she asked.  
  
“You know about that?” Steve asked sitting down next to her.  
  
“Nothing stays a secret from me for long,” Natasha said simply.  
  
“So what do I do?”  
  
“Girls haven’t changed that much in the last sixty years, Cap. They still love it when men bring them flowers and pick them up and take them to dinner and a movie.”  
  
*******  
  
Once the Avengers had been sent to thwart Loki from obliterating New York and enslaving the world, Steve tried not to think about Skye. He couldn’t work very well with his best girl on his mind. It worked for most of the battle, but then he spotted her, cornered by three Chitauri.  
  
Time froze. Natasha was calling on coms, yelling that she could close the Portal, and Tony yelling to wait. The Chitauri hadn’t spotted him yet. He couldn’t figure out how to kill all three of them without risking her. Skye, it seemed, was two steps ahead of him. One of the Chitauri got a little too close and Skye grabbed his gun. She tugged at it, pointing it over her shoulder at the wall. The Chitauri in question gave some sort of shout when Skye whirled the two of them around. Surprised, the Chitauri was forced to follow, pulling the trigger in quick succession; shooting and killing the other two aliens.  
  
“I’m from Hell’s Kitchen, asshole,” Skye said, punching the remaining Chitauri in the face. “That means something around here.”  
  
She glanced up and spotted Steve. The Chitauri started to get up again and Steve strode over, delivering a knockout punch.  
  
“Hey Steve,” Skye said with a slight smile. She was covered in dust from the debris and had a couple scratches on her. Steve still checked over every inch of her. “Steve, Steve…. I’m okay Steve. I’m sturdier than I look.”  
  
Steve was running his hands through her hair, checking for blood and bumps. “I can’t … I can’t lose you,” Steve stammered. “I’ve lost everyone else. All I have is you.”  
  
“This might be a good time to remind you that you forgot something last night,” Skye said.  
  
“What?” Steve asked worriedly.  
  
“A kiss?” Skye tipped her chin upwards and Steve couldn’t help but oblige.  
  
Two seconds later, they watched Tony zoom over and up into the sky hole. They watched with bated breath, watching the streets as they *heard* an explosion above them; and then every single Chitauri collapsed in a heap. Their eyes stayed glued onto the hole while they watched Tony fall through and the Hulk catch him.  
  
Despite the probable clean bill of health, Steve insisted that Skye go with the SHIELD agent for a medical assessment while Steve went and checked on his team. It took SHIELD a full ninety minutes to check Skye over. Steve joined her halfway through the assessment and confirmed to Skye that all the ‘Avengers’ as Tony had dubbed them were fine. Steve took her along to some kind of meeting the Avengers were having after she had been cleared.  
  
Entering the restaurant that Steve had led her to, Skye spotted Loki tied up in the corner and Steve immediately had to restrain her to prevent her from attacking the Asgardian.  
  
Thor frowned. “Are all Midgardian females as violent as those I have witnessed?” he asked.  
  
“Only if you make us angry,” Natasha said, taking an enthusiastic bite of her shawarma.  
  
“And if you think Big Green is tough to deal with, you’ve clearly never angered a 95 pound former Russian assassin,” Tony groused.  
  
“No kidding, Skye took on three Chitauri without any training,” Steve said proudly.  
  
They all looked over at Skye, looking impressed. Skye blushed and shrugged. “Foster kid,” she admitted.  
  
“Me too!” Clint said excitedly. “Up top!” he raised his hand and Skye timidly stepped forward and high-fived him.  
  
So what’s with the groupie, Capsicle?” Tony asked.  
  
“This is my soulmate, Skye.” Steve said, running a hand through Skye’s hair. Tony choked on shawarma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I broke the word count at 2,591 for this one.
> 
> Sue me, it's my birthday. 
> 
> As an aside, this one is within the same universe as Chapter 2 and will in fact have a continuation story.


	11. Hello from the Other Side (Steve/Jemma)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daisy saves Jemma and Bucky feels it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is continued from the [Bucky/Daisy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5678158/chapters/13650358) short. Will does not survive long enough to meet Jemma in this universe - I had a hard enough time with Fitz, let alone having to deal with Jemma being in love with Will.

When Steve had woken up from the ice, the words _Are you a hallucination?_ , were the words on him. He had never had a soulmate before, and wondered if it had been Fate that had caused all this, for him to go from being markless to having words, because he crashed the plane or if it was destined to be from the beginning. Whoever she was, Steve couldn’t wait to meet her. He prayed he wasn’t going to pull her out of a war zone or a firefight.  
  
While waiting for his mate, he joined the Avengers, saved the world, found out Bucky was still alive, saved the world again, found Bucky, and found Bucky’s soulmate. He was beginning to wonder if anyone would ever to say his words. Daisy and Bucky visited each other frequently, but Bucky was still acclimating to the modern era and didn’t trust himself to be with Daisy all the time, despite Daisy’s objections, and Daisy had responsibilities to SHIELD since she refused to abandon the Caterpillar Program. They had bonded though, quite passionately and repeatedly. So much so that Clint and Tony had applauded them the next morning.  
  
Buck was utterly miserable when Daisy had to return to the SHIELD base and the Avengers simultaneously got a call to assemble. It wasn’t long after that that they were all hanging out after the battle, eating, when Bucky bent over suddenly grabbing his head tightly, whimpering.  
  
Everything stopped as Natasha and Steve both crowded around him. A second later, he straightened up, still a little pale. “Something’s wrong with Daisy,” he said simply. It was a testament to Daisy how passionately everyone reacted.  
  
He reached for his phone and hit a number on his speed dial. “Mack?”  
  
The SHIELD agent on the other end of the line sounded distracted. “Hey Buck, you calling about Daisy?”  
  
“Can I talk to her?” Bucky asked.  
  
“She’s… she’s a little busy right now,” Mack said tensely. “I’ll call you back when I can.”  
  
Bucky stared at the phone as Mack hung up and almost called Lance when he received a text from Mack giving latitude and longitude. The Avengers all rushed for the plane, happy to provide Daisy with some obviously much-needed backup.  
  
Natasha and Steve bracketed a panicked Bucky as Clint flew them to the coordinates in England. When they were landing, Bucky was struck by another ‘attack’. Bucky pushed through his pain and bolted the second that they landed. The team ran after him and found him crying over an unconscious Daisy who was bleeding from both ears and her nose.  
  
Steve saw another pretty dame covered in dirt in a hole in the middle of the ground. Steve helped pull her out, lifting her into his arms. The dame coughed a couple times, then asked “Are you a hallucination?”  
  
To his credit, Steve didn’t drop her, but stared at her dumbfounded. “I’ve always had a thing for pretty, English dames,” he said finally.  
  
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, then fainted. Steve laid her carefully on the ground and allowed the SHIELD medics to converge on his soulmate.  
  
They managed to convince Coulson that they should go to the Avenger facility for medical assistance. Daisy had twin burst eardrums, a devastating migraine that caused her to sob at even the faintest hint of light, and her arm bones had been shattered from trying to hold the portal open for as long as possible. She was given a little pain medicine, but needed to stay awake for further testing to ensure she hadn’t damaged anything deeper. They had called ahead and Doctor Cho was already preparing the cradle. Steve could still hear her whimpering into Bucky’s side from his spot next to Jemma across the plane.  
  
Jemma was experiencing the effects of long-term sensory deprivation, malnutrition, and dehydration from her three month stint apparent worlds away. The second two were quickly being resolved, while the third would take time for Jemma’s body to reset. She too had been lightly sedated for her first night home. Steve remained immovable by Jemma’s bedside during the flight. A man named Leo Fitz, her best friend, sat at her feet staring sadly at her. Steve couldn’t help but notice that the younger man’s nails were bitten down to the quick.  
  
“Will you tell me about her?” he asked impulsively. “I’ve been waiting to meet her for quite a while now. Didn’t ever dream it would be as she arrived back from an alien planet, though.”  
  
That made Fitz smile, albeit weakly. “She’s my best friend, and the smartest person I know,” he said in a soft Scottish burr. “Some folks’ll call her lucky to get you for a soulmate, sir, but you’ll find out it’s you who’s the lucky one.”  
  
Steve looked down at his soulmate, “I know I’m lucky, trust me. I’m just a kid from Brooklyn. I never imagined I’d be fated to spend the rest of my life with someone like her.”  
  
Fitz, as everyone seemed to call him, stared at him a little jealously. “We both have soulmates, but I’ve spent the last ten years at her side. I’m glad if I couldn’t be her soulmate, it was you.”  
  
“You’ll find your soulmate, I’m sure.” Steve said with a soft smile.  
  
They hit turbulence suddenly and Daisy cried out further. “Can’t we give her something stronger?” Bucky asked, desperate.  
  
“We need to run scans first,” Mack said, coming over and stroking Daisy’s hair. “I just checked with Clint. We’re 35 minutes out.”  
  
“Mack?” Daisy slurred. “Did Fitz make it back?”  
  
Mack furrowed her brows. “Fitz made it back, Tremors. So did Jemma.”  
  
Daisy looked confused. “Fitz found Jemma in Morocco?” she asked.  
  
Fitz’s eyes went wide. “Daisy, that was months ago,” he said quietly.  
  
“You okay?” Daisy asked, unbothered by the time gap.  
  
Fitz nodded. “I’m okay.”  
  
“Okay,” Daisy said, curling back into Bucky’s side.  
  
They all sat in silence for a while. Mack stared at Fitz, apparently debating to himself whether or not he should say anything. “You shouldn’t have stayed for so long,” he hissed.  
  
“I had to. Jemma was coming,” Fitz argued quietly. “I couldn’t very well go back when I could see her coming.  
  
“You knew what keeping the Portal open would do to Daisy,” Mack whispered unhappily. “I’m happy that Simmons is back, don’t get me wrong, but the rest of us matter too.”  
  
“Enough,” Bucky growled softly. After months of helping Bucky back to remembering himself, Steve recognized the signs of Bucky fighting not to lash out instinctively.  
  
“Maybe we should table this for another time and place,” Steve said stiffly. Even though his serum was better than Bucky’s, Bucky could still hold his own against Steve even when the life of his soulmate hadn’t been threatened. Steve didn’t really want to go up against Bucky when Skye had been injured.  
  
Thankfully, Mack took the hint and dragged Fitz away from the nonagenarians and their soulmates.  
  
*********  
  
Jemma awoke to the cotton-feeling of being drugged. She blinked a couple of times and saw that the lights had been turned way down, just bright enough that she could see, but not so bright that it bothered her.  
  
“How are you feeling?” Steve asked quietly from her bedside, startling her. Steve caught her before she fell off the bed. She tensed at the touch. She had been alone on the alien planet for ages, having stumbled across some expedition’s hideout that hid her from… whatever the hell was out there on the planet. She had been alone for such a long time.  
  
It took her a minute to realize that she was sobbing and Steve was rubbing her back to comfort her, though by the look on his face, her crying scared him more than HYDRA ever had.  
  
She sniffled, giggling a little at the thought. Calming her sobs, she smiled at Steve. “Hello,” she said.  
  
Steve immediately handed her two small, rubber items. It took her a minute to figure out that they were ear plugs. “It took me weeks to get used to my new senses after they gave me the serum. We had something like these and they helped. It should help you re-adjust to being back home.”  
  
“Th-thank you,” Jemma stammered quietly. She blushed and looked down suddenly. “I’m okay, you know. You don’t need to - I mean, I’m sure you have more important things to - I’m okay.”  
  
“Hey,” Steve said, bringing her eyes to meet his own by lifting her chin with his finger, “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here."


	12. Tweet Your Soulmate - The Modern Day Epic of @SkyeNet and @IAmIronMan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony and Skye have always been friends on the Internet, but they've never met in person.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be editing this chapter with a PDF version of the chapter with the created tweets when I get a chance. Because I'm a perfectionist and I need it to look right....

The 2008 incident was not the first time that she tweeted him, but it was the first time that he replied to her. It was just after he had announced that he was Iron Man and Skye had been curious enough about the coding that ran the suit to poke at him over Twitter.

 

Impressed with how @RealTonyStark coded his suit. #playtime  
  
@SkyeNet, I’d like to see you *try* to hack in. #billionaire #genius #firewall  
  
@RealTonyStark Challenge Accepted and Achievement Unlocked. #hackedit  
  
@RealTonyStark You’re a great engineer, but my hacking skills are far better than yours.#skyenet1stark0  
  
@Skyenet okay, okay, I’m impressed. I see where you broke in and I’m repairing the holes. Care to work for SI? #joboffer #seriously  
  
@RealTonyStark I don’t work for weapons manufacturers. #merchantofdeath  
  
@Skyenet Haven’t you heard? I don’t do that any more. I’m Iron Man #nailedit

  
Thus started a beautiful friendship. The pair of them tweeted each other, providing a heavy stream of followers for each of them as the world watched them volley snark back and forth. Skye often wondered how people would react to the opposite worlds that they had come from. She had never had a home or a family, had run away with nothing but a van when she was sixteen, and the only other thing she had to her name now the brand new laptop that she had just won in a pool game bet. He was born with a silver spoon up his…whatever. 

  
In all honesty, Skye didn’t really care that he was rich and she wasn’t. On the DarkNet, in the places where she really lived, money didn’t matter and neither did gender. In those spaces and places, the only thing that mattered was how well you could hack. She knew that he was trying to backtrace her code to determine her location. She sent the trace to several entertaining spots around the globe, even though she could barely afford the gas it would take to drive to Jersey.  
  
After about a year of them tweeting back and forth, exchanging pieces of their day-to-day lives and Skye intermittently hacking Stark Industries to prove that she could. Tony (for he was Tony after a year) regularly sang her praises and offered her jobs. She had gone to the Stark Expo the day it opened and took an Instagram of Tony, which got several hundred likes. Skye heard from friends that some people shipped her with him, but Skye was pretty sure that Tony didn’t see her like that. A question from Tony progressed things further.

  
@Skyenet I’ve searched and searched, but I can’t figure out where you went to college. Could I have a hint?  
  
DM @IamIronMan I never went to college.  
  
DM @Skyenet Tell me you’re not in high school. Tell me I’m not creeping on someone I shouldn’t.  
  
DM @IamIronMan I’m not in High School. Hacker’s promise, or whatever. I moved a lot as a kid. Went to 20-something schools from K-12. Dropped out at 16 and got my GED.  
  
DM @Skynet Surely your parents would have noticed how smart you were…

  
Skye didn’t have an answer to that. She assumed with how smart Tony (was it Tony now? after corresponding for as long as they had, he felt like Tony) was, he could put together that she was an orphan. Eventually she answered him with

  
DM @IamIronMan who says they didn’t.

  
Thankfully, the conversation gravitated away from the subject of parents. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Tony was catching on to things. He kept asking her to do things, like testing the SI Firewall. Some of the firewall blocks were weird, too. It required all kinds of advanced calculations that most firewalls never required, but Skye chalked it up to Tony being an eccentric.  
  
Skye had been in Manhattan the day that aliens had rained down from the sky. She grabbed as many people off the street as she could during the first wave and high-tailed it to Jersey. The group of strangers she had grabbed, as well as others who had made it through the tunnel, stood in stunned silence as they watched the destruction and death. Skye could see Tony off in the distance, fighting to protect them all. She liked that about Tony. Despite his faults and his tendencies to take things to an extreme, Tony wanted to protect people.  
  
Cosplaying as Iron Man in front of the Tower, Skye made sure to take a selfie of herself with the mask on and tweet it to Tony. Tony responded publicly, in true Tony fashion, by commenting about her chest. Privately, he passed along his cell phone number and requested that she keep in touch. She also got several emails from Pepper Potts expressing concern over Tony and a request for Skye to help keep an electronic eye on him.  
  
A day later she messed up and let it slip that she was homeless, tweeting about a bum who had attempted to break into her van while she was sleeping inside. Which, judging by Tony’s reaction, was a giant mistake.  
  
Odd things started happening to Skye from that point on. It started out slowly. First she got a call from her bank stating that they had miscalculated her interest and she was owed a back payment of $500. Then, when she went to fill her phone card, the teller noted that her card already had $120 on it, enough to last her three months. Her van registration sticker showed up in the mail one day out of the blue without her hacking the DMV.  
  
She texted Tony after that one, who feigned ignorance, but two days later she had received a gas card that didn’t seem to ever run out of funds. She took the van across the country, seeing every single thing she ever dreamed of seeing. She hacked for Rising Tide, visited Miles, saw the Grand Canyon, and Vegas, then stopped in LA. Tony seemed to follow her everywhere she went, getting her nights in hotels and delivering her groceries that didn’t require refrigeration. She had considered protesting, but let it go. Tony liked to protect the people that he cared about and the fact that he wasn’t bored with her was proof that he cared for her on some level.  
  
She didn’t say anything when she got picked up by SHIELD, mostly because she wasn’t some damsel in distress, and some part of her hesitated because Tony still didn’t know what she looked like and she didn’t want to ruin the mystery. She tweeted and texted him when she could, refusing to reveal what she was doing. Tony kept prodding her, assuming that she had accepted an offer from the private sector.  
  
After she slept with Miles and got caught, she knew she was in trouble, but she knew that the bracelet was going to give her more trouble from Tony’s panic than anything else. He would find her for sure now, and would have every motivation to.

**********

Tony wasn’t panicking. That’s what he told himself. He wasn’t panicking about the fact that he hadn’t heard anything from Skye in two weeks. He was having JARVIS scan every camera on the planet, tracking down every lead he could, but he couldn’t find any sign of what had happened to her.  
  
He realized that he couldn’t live without Skye. Pepper had accepted this long before Tony had, and pointed out to him that they were well-matched for each other. Every time she looked at him though, she had a weird look in her eye - like she knew something that Tony didn’t. It was impossible though. The only person who came close to knowing more than he did was Skye, so it bugged him that Pepper refused to tell him. They had broken up months ago, after realizing that they were better as friends. Besides, Pepper had met her soulmate, a SHIELD agent named Cameron Klein, who was a little like a pre-serumed Steve Rogers. Pepper seemed happy with him though and that’s all Tony really wanted for her.  
  
Unfortunately, Pepper’s happiness only made him realize that Skye had become the source of his own. He had to have her in his life and the fact that she was missing made him realize just a sliver of what Rhodey and Pepper must have gone through when he was in Afghanistan. After three sleepless nights, he asked Pepper what it had been like for her when he was missing. It had led to a long, tearful night as Pepper recounted the hell that they had all gone through searching for Tony - searching and finding nothing.  
  
After a week, he asked Steve, Natasha, and Clint. Clint had heard from a friend of a friend about a hacker named Skye who had been recruited by a Level 8 agent whose identity was classified. Another week passed before Clint heard from another source that the team had arrived at a base known as The HUB. A scan of the security feed while they were flying to the HUB’s location revealed another startling revelation - Coulson was the Level 8 agent. JARVIS sent an image of Skye to Tony’s phone and he couldn’t help but let his breath be taken away by how beautiful and young she was.  
  
Skye was tugging at the bracelet as it magnetically stuck itself to the wall when Tony, Clint, and Steve found her alone in a hallway. She froze when she heard the second Tony started speaking. "Six years. Six years I spent getting to know you and then you up and go missing and you know what I realized? I love you. Screw my soulmate. I love the fact that you seem to sleep less than me, even though you're always tired. I love the way you never saw me as a genius, but saw me as some guy who had no chance of coding better than you, yet you were still brought your A-game every single time. I love the fact that you see the beauty in artificial intelligence and insist on talking to robots. So that's it. I love you. I don't know how you did it but you made me fall in love with you."  
  
Skye stared at Tony wide-eyed, then started laughing. Tony wilted in front of them and Skye stopped. "Didn't anyone ever teach you not to say too much to your soulmate the first time you speak to them?"  
  
Tony froze. Those words were written on him. His soulwords. This was his soulmate. He’d known her for years without ever really knowing that she was his. They stared at each other as five people broke through the crowd that had formed.  
  
One of them was a hot, older, Asian woman who looked like she could give Natasha a run for her money, one was Coulson, one was some angry guy with a stick up his ass, and the last two were… FitzSimmons?  
  
“We’re soulmates?” Skye said. “After everything… _we’re_ soulmates?”  
  
“Don’t tell me you're disappointed,” Stark said glibly, preparing himself for the worst.  
  
“God no,” Skye said with a smile.  
  
“Tony Stark, though? But he’s a genius!” Jemma Simmons said.  
  
Skye went dark red and looked down, but not before Tony could see the tears forming in Skye’s eyes. “So is she,” Tony practically growled. Fitz, Simmons, and Ward all looked at Tony, wide-eyed at the revelation.  
  
Skye was staring at him too, eyes shining. “The firewalls? That was a test?”  
  
Tony smiled, approaching her. “I was curious,” he said with a shrug. “And I was fairly sure of the answer. Now, is there a lounge or something we can go to, because I really want to deal with The Walking Dead over there somewhere where there aren’t any witnesses.”  
  
“I wouldn’t know,” Skye said, smiling back and tilting her head up, “I’m just a consultant.” Tony kissed his soulmate, for once not giving a damn who was watching him.

  



	13. Rescue Me (Phil/May, platonic Skye)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil/May (requested by Sarra), but with a twist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Confession. This one kinda got away from me plot-wise, and word-wise (3,693). I regret nothing.

_Phil_  
  
Phil Coulson grew up with one word on his hip and it wasn’t ‘hi’. Instead, “bullshit” had appeared on his hip one day when he was five. His friends thought the word was hilarious, his parents and teachers thought less-so. The matter was cleared up when he showed his parents the word on his skin and they explained that it was an adult word that would one day be said to him by his soulmate.  
  
After High School, Phil joined the Army to get out of Wisconsin and joined SHIELD after that. His first day of SHIELD training, he and some old Army buddies who had joined with him were making crazy predictions. Phil was laughing when he jokingly said that he’d become director of SHIELD one day and be the best agent SHIELD ever saw.  
  
“Bullshit,” someone said.  
  
Phil turned and saw the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen. “I never dared to think of someone so lovely when I thought about my soulmate,” he said before wincing. Foot. In. Mouth.  
  
The woman’s eyebrow quirked. “My soulmate’s cheesy. Interesting,” she said with a smile. “I’m Melinda May.”  
  
“Phil Coulson,” Phil said. The rest was history. They weren’t a match made in heaven. Their lives weren’t perfect, but they somehow fit each other just right.  
  
Two weeks later a second mark appeared on both of them in blue in the same handwriting - the mark of a platonic soulmate. It was extremely rare to have a soulmate of any kind that far apart in age. A shared platonic soulmate with that much of an age difference was unrecorded.  
  
They looked for her (or him, but the handwriting looked feminine), but there weren’t many clues. His words were ‘what up?’ and Melinda’s were ‘let go of me.’ Both sets of words made them realize that they’d may have been platonically linked to someone who got on the wrong side of SHIELD that they’d be forced to apprehend.  
  
They looked for her, maybe not as actively as they should have, but they did search for her. They bonded and got married, both of them wanting kids but neither of them able to find the right time to become parents. A decade passed, then another. They rose in the SHIELD ranks. They won some battles and lost some. Bahrain happened and Melinda pulled away from Phil. While the house they owned became silent, they remained married.  
  
Slowly, Melinda began to heal, but just as she was getting back to her old self, Phil died and the world came crumbling back down on top of her. Phil later heard that she knew the moment the mark disappeared, then watched numbly as Avengers battled the Chitauri.  
  
According to Fury, Maria Hill found her six hours later, drunk on the floor of her New York apartment that had been luckily untouched by the attack, not that Melinda cared at that point. The funeral had been private, Phil had been buried back in Wisconsin, closed casket since Phil was actually alive. The only other people there were the Avengers. Stark had been shocked that ‘agent’ had been married and kept trying to buy her things to comfort her. Clint offered to take her to his home, but Melinda refused. Melinda joined Phil the second she was able to and from there, the world kept turning. Phil went through intensive rehab and the two of them grew closer, motivated by the second chance fate had given them. After nearly a year, Phil was back to work, being given the ‘Bus’ and a team of his own. He got Melinda on board, mostly because he liked getting to see her every day. He thought that everything would start to go back to normal - or as normal as SHIELD ever got. Of course, it was always a general rule of thumb at SHIELD that one should expect the unexpected. And Skye was certainly an unexpected element.  
  
Phil had ripped open the van door and Ward had held the bag not twenty-four hours later, and the young woman (almost a girl by the looks of things) certainly hadn’t be what he expected in a target. He was surprised to say the least to see that the hacker that they were after was a young woman who barely looked twenty, but when when she asked the two of them, “What up?” he had to fight the urge to prevent himself from stopping Ward, who shoved the bag over her head.  
  
Skye had fought them, though not that hard and Phil made a note that if Skye _was_ their third, he’d make sure to get her trained. “Get your damn hands off me. This can’t be legal, you haven’t even read me my rights!”  
  
May met them when they pulled into the bus and gave them a look as they dragged out a still struggling woman. She rolled her eyes, then hoisted the woman up into a fireman’s carry. “Let go of me!” the woman shouted.  
  
May nearly dropped the hacker in her shock, but kept her grip strong as Phil nodded at her. May carried the young woman upstairs and allowed him to lead her to interrogation before going to the cockpit to execute maintenance checks on the engine, though she listened in on the conversation. There was a hint of surprise in Skye’s voice when Coulson said his first words to her, and her eyes widened further when May first spoke to her, but there was no time to speak further on the matter of soulmates.  
  
After that, it was a whirl of action, from finding Mike to Skye being kidnapped to Union Station. They had meant to pull Skye aside and discuss the marks, but they couldn’t seem to find the time until Coulson was talking to Fury after the 0-8-4 mission had gone sideways and he realized they had never had the conversation.  
  
“The girl,” Fury said with an inquisitive eye, “she’s a risk.”  
  
“She’s our platonic,” Phil said.  
  
Fury raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?” He was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Makes a lot of sense, actually. You three could do well together.”  
  
_Melinda_  
  
They had sworn Melinda to secrecy before allowing her to see him. After the Battle of New York, Maria stayed with her as Melinda teetered on the edge of alcohol poisoning for five days until Melinda’s mark came back. Melinda thought she was hallucinating for a full twelve hours as Maria sobered her up. Nearly hysterical, she was taken to Fury who explained what he had done. Melinda spent a good hour yelling at Fury over it. She then cried with joy for about twenty minutes, and yelled for another hour.  
  
It was rather interesting having their platonic on board without anyone acknowledging the elephant in the room. As the others watched the 0-8-4 being launched into space, Melinda reflected on Skye. She was even-headed, highly-skilled, and just a little too cocky, though that was a quality that as well-earned from what Melinda could see. Even Stark had needed to be physically present to hack SHIELD computers, but with Skye, firewalls seemed not to apply. It was rather shocking to hear that Skye was a high school drop-out. SHIELD intelligence had profiled Skye to have at least one PhD.  
  
After Fury yelled at Phil and left, Phil and Melinda decided it was time to confront Skye. The young hacker winced at seeing how serious their faces were when she entered the office. Panicked, she started babbling. “Look, if this is about the plan or what I was saying to Ward…”  
  
“This isn’t about that Skye,” Melinda said from her seat, trying not to startle her. “Can you sit down?” Skye sat slowly, her eyes flitting from Phil to May, eyes distrustful. “Do you recall our first words to you?”  
  
Skye looked away, blushing hard. “I didn’t want to mention it if you didn’t…” she said softly. “I figured it might be a fluke. There aren’t any reports of two soulmates having a platonic third together…”  
  
Coulson sat down next to Skye. “It’s very rare, but it can happen. The platonic would have to be pretty special.”  
  
Skye was still for a long time. Melinda was okay with that, understanding the need to process things. “Okay,” she said finally, looking very small.  
  
“Can I ask you… do you have a mark apart from ours?” Phil asked.  
  
Skye nodded. “It’s says, ‘please don’t hurt me,’ but weird stuff kept happening when I searched for him, so I stopped.”  
  
“What kind of weird stuff?” Melinda asked curiously. She tried not to think of the worst-case scenario.  
  
Skye shrugged. “An internet cafe I was at was raided an hour later, a gas station had an oil leak and exploded. Everyone was arrested at a bookstore for possession of narcotics. That one I had to climb out through the air vents and after that I stopped searching.”  
  
Melinda frowned. While not the worst-case scenario, it definitely wasn’t a good sign when things were _that_ weird. “Do you think they’re after you?” Phil asked. It couldn’t have been a government agency, or not an American one. They wouldn’t have blown up the gas station. If someone was after Skye though… Melinda felt instinctively protective of the girl despite herself.  
  
Skye shrugged. “Whoever they are, I don’t think they know what I look like. I wiped my identity a couple times. Most of the places I grab WiFi at don’t have security cameras in them and the ones that do my programs automatically turn them off. If they don’t know what I look like, they can’t find me.”  
  
Their next mission was heart-stopping both for Melinda and Phil. The rest of the team was concerned over Skye’s loyalty since none of the three had shared their status, but Melinda and Phil could both feel Skye’s nerves. They had full confidence in her abilities, though. It was Quinn that was the wild card.  
  
Of course, it had been Doctor Hall that had been truly unpredictable. After the gravitonium had been locked away and the team had settled down, Ward and May both sat, watching Skye try her best not to look like a drowned rat. Ward started to get up, but Melinda cut him off. She wasn’t leaving Skye’s fate in his hands. “I’m taking over her training,” she said, getting up. She grabbed Skye by the arm and pushed her past the labs and into storage.  
  
_Skye_  
  
“What the hell?” Skye asked, feeling threads of anger from May.  
  
“We need to talk about what happened today,” May said.  
  
“I told you - I told everyone that I have a few tricks up my sleeve.” Skye said defensively. “I wasn’t about to betray SHIELD. Just because I don’t fight the same as Mr. Roboto out there doesn’t mean that I can’t fight. I _was_ raised in foster care, after all. I’ve had to fight off my fair share of skeevy foster dads.”  
  
May froze. “Did that happen a lot?” she asked softly.  
  
“A few of them ended up with broken hands. When I was old enough I usually ran back to St. Agnes’. When I was sixteen I just … ran.” May scrutinized Skye carefully. Skye couldn’t meet her gaze, trying not to let her embarrassment through the bond.  
  
Skye could feel disappointment through the bond and her cheeks reddened further. “Look, I get it. I wasn’t what you were expecting in a soulmate.” Skye said, tears welling in her eyes. “You don’t want me - it’s okay. No one ever has. I’ve raised myself for twenty-five years and I don’t need you. So if you want me gone, I’ll go. I don’t like guns anyway. Guns and nearly falling out of airplanes wasn’t what I signed up for when I said I’d get on the crazy plane. You don’t have to -” May stopped her by wrapping her in a hug.  
  
Skye froze at the contact instinctively, then felt something shocking through the bond. Love. She had never felt it before. Tears stung her eyes as she fought May half-heartedly until the fight left her and she sank down to the ground, dissolving in sobs. “Shh,” May said. “I’ve got you. I’m sorry you had to go through all that alone. I wish I had been there.”  
  
AC, probably feeling Skye’s distress, came down not long after and put his hand on her shoulder. Skye flinched back and AC immediately backed off.  
  
“We’re not going to leave you, Skye,” May said softly.  
  
“Why wouldn’t you?” Skye asked, her jaw set and eyes determined, trying not to cry… again. “Everyone else has.”  
  
“Everyone else wasn’t your soulmates,” AC said steadily. “You’ll always have us when you need us and we’ll be with you as long as you want us.” Skye’s resolve for keeping her secret a secret started to crumble. If they were willing to stand by her, would they say the same after seeing her document? Skye bit her lip, feeling awkward. After all, she was mostly sure that she could trust her soulmates.  
  
AC came forward, crouched down, and hugged her. “I promise that we’ll be there whenever we can,” he said quietly.  
  
Skye felt it as her resolve bit the dust. “There’s… there’s something I haven’t told you,” she said quietly. She blushed as she produced the SD card from her bra and handed it to him, looking down at her shoes.  
  
“What’s this?” AC asked patiently.  
  
“It’s everything I have,” Skye said. Neither of her soulmates said anything and Skye swallowed audibly. “Everything I have on me. It’s what I was looking for when I hacked into SHIELD the first time. The story of my origins is this giant question mark. All I could find was a redacted SHIELD document.”  
  
May joined her on her other side. “Let’s take this upstairs,” AC said. Skye wasn’t sure why, but somehow she knew that the simple act of trust had changed her entire future.  


*******

  
A year passed. Skye captured Miles, to the great pride of May and AC. May and Skye went nuts when Coulson was kidnapped, Coulson and May both went more than a little out of their minds when Skye was shot, and they all held on to each other while SHIELD crumbled around them. Jemma was a little surprised when they revealed that Skye was their platonic soulmate, but she took it in stride.  
  
Keeping whatever resources they could was in their best interest, so Skye kept in contact with the Rising Tide. A couple of times while she was on an old IRC channel with them they talked about some crazy rumor that Steve Rogers was searching for the Winter Soldier. Some said it was for revenge, but someone pointed out with various security camera screenshots that Steve seemed to recognize the Soldier.  
  
As they continued to speculate, Skye started multitasking. Struck by inspiration and more than a little bored, Skye searched the Smithsonian Howling Commandos exhibit records to check for matching handwriting. Skye hadn’t really expected to get a match, and she seriously hadn’t expected the match to be Bucky Barnes.  
  
She searched the SHIELD servers, which included the data dump, for Bucky, and nothing came up. Nothing came up when she searched for Winter Soldier too, except a handful of newspaper articles. Then she remembered a story AC had told her about Natasha Romanov and how the Red Room had referred to ‘Assets’ in their record.  
  
She searched for ‘Asset’ and thousands of results returned including doctor’s notes for the past fifty years. She started reading, and that’s how May found her hours later. “Skye? You missed Tai Chi and you’re late for sparring,” May said crossly.  
  
Skye had been pouring over note after note about how HYDRA had tortured her soulmate all night, so was on no sleep and was in a high state of stress when she looked at May. She must have looked awful.  
  
“Woah! Skye, this is why we tell you no more all nighters,” May said.  
  
“They tortured him,” Skye said quietly. “For seventy years.”  
  
May looked at her in confusion. “Who?”  
  
“My soulmate,” she said. “I know who he is.”  
  
May sat down. “Skye, what’s going on?” she asked. Skye sighed and brought up the comparison of Bucky Barnes’ handwriting and her own, the computer software displaying the match. May stood up again. “That… shouldn’t be possible,” she said in shock.  
  
“There’s more,” Skye said. “He’s the Winter Soldier.”  
  
May whirled around. If it were any other situation, Skye would be beside herself laughing. She never thought it would be possible to render Melinda May speechless.  
  
May tapped her com. “Coulson, get to the Comms Center now,” she barked. They stood, staring at each other until Coulson came running in.  
  
“What’s the big emergency?” Coulson asked. He looked at the screen. Stared at it, actually. Stared at the blinking green “match” on top and the photo of Bucky Barnes.  
  
“Does that… why were you comparing Bucky Barnes’ handwriting to your soulmark?” Coulson asked.  
  
“It’s… I was bored. I was checking in with my Rising Tide contacts and they were talking about this internet rumor that Captain Rogers is looking for the Winter Soldier. And then I found all of these,” Skye said, bringing up the documents, all marked Asset with the date. “They backlog to 1945,” Skye said softly. “They’ve been torturing him.”  
  
Coulson, at least, seemed to keep his voice, albeit barely. “Do they still have him?” She didn’t respond. “Skye?”  
  
Skye shook her head. “They lost him after HYDRA came out of the shadows. They don’t actually know where he is now.”  
  
Phil sighed and broke it down, more for him than anyone else. “So we have a POW-turned-assassin who’s currently self-deprogramming and god knows what else happening to his mental state who has unlimited resources and skills. He’s been known to remain invisible from SHIELD even when we had all the resources we ever wanted which means there’s no way in hell we can find him now.”  
  
“We can’t just do nothing, AC.”  
  
Coulson sighed. “He knows,” supplied May as Coulson pulled out a cell phone.  
  
“Who is he -”  
  
“The only Avenger that will take his call right now,” May said, though she looked… eager.  
  
“Hello,” Coulson said.  
  
“Son of Coul!” Skye heard through the phone. Skye couldn’t help but grin. Apparently Thor didn’t understand cell phones. “I was not aware that you could call Midgardian mobile devices from Valhalla.”  
  
“Thor, I need you to assemble the Avengers. Tell them we need to meet… we need to meet where the Triskellion fell in two hours.”  
  
“I will inform Man of Iron and Steve of this, you have my word,” Thor said solemnly.  
  
Coulson hung up. “Well, we’re in it now,” Coulson said.  
  
“You needed to tell them anyway.” May said. “What are you going to do, pretend that you’re dead for years and years? You’re SHIELD’s director, act like it.”  
  
Skye gave Coulson a hug. “Thank you,” she said softly.  
  
In the end, it was just May, Coulson, and Skye waiting for six Avengers at the base of the ruins of the Triskellion.  
  
Skye did her best not to cower, but the Avengers looked intimidating in person. They also looked _mad_.  
  
“I know you’re mad,” Coulson started.  
  
“Mad doesn’t even begin to cover it, Coulson,” Clint snapped. “Fury said you died.”  
  
Are you even his soulmate?” Tony asked May.  
  
“I am,” May said evenly. “Phil died on the Helicarrier. My mark disappeared for five days before it came back.”  
  
“That’s not possible,” Bruce said. “It’s simply not scientifically sound.”  
  
“That’s assuming Fury only used humane medical treatments,” May muttered.  
  
“What was that?” Steve snapped.  
  
“Fury brought me back with some kind of alien drug,” Coulson said. “It… wasn’t a pleasant experience to come back.” Skye winced, remembering finding AC, hearing the screams, and feeling the panic. Melinda put an arm around her.  
  
“It was Fury’s decision to keep you in the dark. Now that Coulson’s Director, we wanted to loop you in,” Melinda said.  
  
The Avengers were all staring at Skye. “You got something to say?” Skye asked challengingly.  
  
“You just seem…” Clint said. “You seem like a family.”  
  
Skye smiled and looked at May and AC. “We kind of are. I’m their platonic third.”  
  
_That_ got a reaction. “A _platonic third_?” Stark asked. “Those _exist_?”  
  
“Rare, but not unheard of,” Natasha said quietly. “I know you’ve been looking for them for a long time.”  
  
“We’re also here for another reason,” Melinda said.  
  
“We’re here about Bucky,” Skye said.  
  
Steve sucked in a breath. “Bucky? What about him?”  
  
Skye pulled up her pant leg, showing Steve her soulmark. His eyes went wide in recognition. “I figured out who he is. I found HYDRA’s records about what they did to him.” Skye teared up again dropping her pant leg. “I want to find my soulmate.”  
  
Steve slowly approached her. “I think I’d like to help with that,” he said softly. “Can I… I mean, do you mind if I give you a hug?”  
  
Skye grinned. “Yeah, you can give me a hug,” she said. Steve hugged her tightly.  
  
Skye hadn’t wanted to be away from Coulson or May for long, but she begrudgingly accepted that the job came first and there was more to finding Bucky than just about finding her soulmate. It was about getting him away from HYDRA, who was sure to be searching for him.  
  
Skye impressed Tony with her hacking skills and for anything else, she would’ve be proud of that, but she only cared about finding Bucky. It took ten weeks of Skye searching almost non-stop before Steve and Skye were able to track him down in a little town outside of Seattle.  
  
He was filthy and injured and sick, lying in a homemade shelter in an alley. Skye had been the first to approach him. “Please don’t hurt me,” Bucky requested quietly.  
  
“I wouldn’t dare,” She said, pulling up her pant leg to show the former HYDRA assassin.  
  
Bucky stared at the mark before putting out a trembling hand to brush it. “Mine,” he said quietly.


	14. Runaway Like a Freight Train (Bucky/Skye/Steve)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skye gains her powers and Coulson drops her off at the Retreat. Then everything changes.

Skye watched the Quinjet leave her at the Retreat with disappointment. She felt the buzzing in her arms and decided enough was enough. Another family abandoning her. Some part of her wanted to stay and hold on to hope, but her heart wasn’t in it. They looked at her with fear and confusion and hatred now. They weren’t her family anymore. Maybe they never were. The only cameras at the retreat were outside, so she hacked the feeds and created a loop from footage from the past 24 hours to make it look like all was quiet, then she hacked the laser fence so it would shut down for fifteen minutes, and finally she packed her things into her bag and started walking.  
  
Not for the first time in her life did Skye sleep under overpasses and in alleyways. She chopped off all her hair, bleached it blonde, and largely hid it under a hat or within her hoodie. She hitchhiked when she could, not really too sure of where she was going, just knowing that she had to go away from wherever she was, which turned out to be Virginia. She couldn’t go back to her old life with the Rising Tide and Miles, but couldn’t go back to SHIELD with the way things stood. Then there was the fact that she couldn’t stay on the road for too long - SHIELD would find her if she wasn’t careful. Some nights she slept alright, while others she would awake from nightmares of her father or Ward or Whitehall or SHIELD finding her and experimenting on her or worse. Those were the nights when she would wake up with the ground shaking around her.  
  
At some point, she found her way to Calgary, heading towards Alaska. She had eaten dinner at a soup kitchen not too far away and was just settling down to sleep in an alcove when she heard someone approach. She palmed the knife she carried on her at all times, then opened her eyes. The man’s eyes were blue and there was confusion and pain and _loss_ in them. His long hair was a little scraggly, but cleaner than most of the bums that lived on the street and he didn’t smell like he had just crawled out of a liquor bottle. He didn’t exactly _look_ homeless. Still, as the man took a step forward, Skye’s grip on her knife tightened. She tried to reign in the buzzing in her arms, but the ground around her shook.  
  
The man looked at her carefully, as if he immediately knew it was her fault. It reminded her of the look in Trip’s eyes just before. The man stared at her, unafraid, and approached her. “What’s… a pretty, young... doll like you doing... in a place like this?” The man asked, speaking articulately if haltingly. The buzzing stopped as hope flooded her essence. Skye dropped the knife in shock at his words, her soul words, and the blade hit her thigh.   
  
She hissed, gripping the wound as blood oozed out. The shaking around them increased. She was almost afraid to speak to this man, but when he stepped further towards her, his eyes full of concern and invading her personal space, she spoke on instinct, hands rising to stop him.”Shit! No, I’ve got it.”  
  
The man froze, his hand going to his own thigh. “I have those words.” Before Skye could process his response, he scooped her up, the buzzing and shaking slowing down. Slowly, the coolness of a metal arm registered. “My soulmate,” he said slowly. “I had another soulmate… the man on the bridge…”  
  
Skye’s eyes were wide. This was the Winter Soldier. She was unsure if she should be afraid or comforted by the way the man held her. “I have other words too,” she said slowly.  
  
“You’re in danger,” he said. “HYDRA will come after you because of me.”  
  
“HYDRA’s already after me,” Skye admitted quietly. She relaxed a little. If he feared that HYDRA would come after her, maybe, just maybe there was an outside chance he wasn’t as dedicated to HYDRA as everyone thought. She palmed the knife, ready to fight back and tightening her grip on her control over her powers. as he took her to a seedy motel and laid her down on the bed.   
  
“Pants off,” he demanded, turning away from her.  
  
“Oh hell no!” she objected immediately, blushing. “There’s no way I’m doing that. I don’t even know your name and soulmate or no, I don’t do that sort of thing.”  
  
The man turned to face her and she saw he was holding a needle and thread. A bottle of alcohol and a lighter was on the table behind him. He looked confused for a second before blushing himself. “For the cut. It’ll scar otherwise,” he said quietly.  
  
Skye blushed and sliding down her pants just enough to give him access to the wound. “I’m Skye, by the way,” Skye said.  
  
“Bucky… my name was Bucky…” Bucky said as he worked. His stiffness seemed to melt away slowly as he worked. Skye watched, a little fascinated as he applied a little ice-like tool that numbed the area, precisely stitch for a few stitches, then repeat the process until her skin was sewn together, all neat and tidy. “Now I’m James.”  
  
“I can understand that. I was Daisy, now I’m Skye,” she said, pulling up her pants. Her history could be for another time, but she certainly understood the reasoning behind wanting to change a name, especially after what James had been through. “Thanks,” she said a little awkwardly. Recognition struck Skye. James… Bucky… she peered at him, studying his face. He did look quite a bit like Bucky Barnes. Her eyes went wide as she realized the depth of HYDRA’s crimes. Captain America’s best friend. “...Oh,” she said slowly.  
  
James looked away from her, his voice evening out. “They took me and made me into… I think I was their weapon.”  
  
Small items started rattling on the table as Skye remembered Sif’s words. “I know a little something about that,” Skye said, fear swelling inside her. James definitely noticed the shaking items, but didn’t visibly react.  
  
“You wanna talk about it or just cuddle?” James asked flirtatiously, deflecting.  
  
Very slowly, Skye shifted to one side, making the conscious decision to allow him onto the bed. James immediately sat down, needing no further invitation, and pulled her into his lap. The simple action broke something within Skye. She felt wet patches on her cheeks and realized she was crying. Everything that had happened since Coulson had picked her up… it was almost like there was too much to cry over, so she never had.  
  
“Can you tell me about it, doll?” James asked. Slowly, Skye found herself telling James her entire story. About the redacted SHIELD document and the foster homes and living virtually on the streets. She told him about getting kidnapped by SHIELD and getting invited on to the Bus. She skipped over being shot, figuring that was a story for another time, but told him of how Ward kidnapped her when HYDRA came out of the shadows and of his obsession with her (James was careful not to squeeze her too tightly at this news, but he did look viciously angry). Then she told him of learning about the truth behind her origins, of the Kree DNA that brought Coulson back, and of the Obelisk and the powers she had gained.  
  
When she finished her tale, James continued holding her. It felt sort of awkward, but nice. She wasn’t used to someone reacting so protective of her. She leaned against him, listening to his heartbeat and finally falling asleep in James’ arms, the effects of her having found her soulmate not really hitting her fully.  
  
\--------  
  
So they ran and the months passed, James taught her how to survive, how to hide, and how to run. He taught her what little he remembered of his youth and Steve, and she shared her’s. They returned to the states and moved around quickly. James had a car and some resources stashed in a few places, but they didn’t have enough money to live out of motels. For the most part, they ate in soup kitchens and slept in the car. If SHIELD or HYDRA were actively looking for them, Skye never saw any sign of them, though Bucky may have kept them off their trail.  
  
Unfortunately, their bubble couldn’t last forever. One day, after they had been traveling for a couple months, Skye started sneezing. Two days later, a cough developed. Everything went downhill from there. James tried his best to keep her healthy, but living on the streets, on the run from multiple spy organizations, options were limited. Skye refused to go to the hospital, and the terror in her face evident every time James asked to bring her to a doctor (or even a doctor to her) was enough for him to accept her refusal.  
  
Subtly, James started moving them back towards New York. James knew that if it got bad enough, he may need to turn to Steve to get him to help Skye, no matter what the consequences were for him. The morning Skye’s fever reached 104* in a car park in Hoboken, his resolve broke.  
  
Checking in to the motel with the little money they had left, he left her on the bed hesitantly. “Don’t move, okay doll?” he said, setting the trash can beside her and praying that he could find Steve quickly. He tracked Steve down and caught up with him on the man’s daily run through Central Park.   
  
“Steve,” James said.   
  
Steve was stopped in his tracks as he stared at him. “Buck? Is it really you?” he asked in shock. James trembled, thinking about what Pierce had ordered him to do, to kill his own soulmate. Trapped in his own body, he had screamed and struggled against the mental bonds that had chained him the last seventy years. Each time he had nearly broken free, they had reinforced the bonds. But on the helicarrier, Steve had said the magic words that had allowed James to shatter the bonds.  
  
“‘Til the end of the line, punk,” James said thickly. “I need your help.”   
  
Steve rushed him, embracing his mate. “Bucky,” Steve cried.  
  
“I’m okay, punk. But I need you to come with me,” James said.   
  
Steve stiffened. “Why,” Steve said suspiciously.  
  
“I found our third,” James said. Steve’s eyes went wide.  
  
“You found… how?”  
  
“She’s sick, Steve, she needs help.”

 

\---------

 

When they returned to the motel, they found Skye on the floor, gasping for air, her eyes cloudy. They both rushed to her side as she blinked hazily up at them. Recognition flitted across Skye’s face when she saw James, then panic set in when she saw Steve. “Are you here to kill me?” she asked quietly.  
  
Steve’s eyes went wide as he turned to stare at James, unsure of how to respond. He had awoken from the ice with those words, but it was still a shock to hear them. Finally, he knelt down by the bed and tentatively ran a hand through the woman’s short ash-blonde hair. “I could never hurt my soulmate,” Steve said. She stared back at Steve. “I’m going to pick you up,” Steve said.   
  
“How long has she been like this?” Steve asked as he eased her head back onto the pillow.  
  
“Four days,” James said. “She was sick a week before that, but... not this bad. She refuses to go to the hospital or a doctor.”  
  
“No,” the woman protested, shaking her head. “No hospital.” The clock on the side table rattled slightly. It didn’t take long for him to put two and two together. “... gonna kill me.”  
  
“Okay,” Steve said, crouching down and stroking her hair. “I won’t take you. I promise. I’m Steve.”   
  
“Skye,” the woman slurred.  
  
He stroked her hair until the woman’s breathing eased and the clock stopped rattling. “What about if I bring you to a friend of mine?” he suggested. “He can help.”  
  
“They’re coming for me...” The woman whimpered. Steve put the back of his hand against her forehead and hissed at how warm she was. He quickly texted Bruce, then gathered her into his arms, blankets and all. It scared him how weakly she fought him as they ducked out of the motel room and into the SUV Steve brought. He couldn’t bring himself to even look at James. He was torn between the joy that James had come back to him, the anger that James let their soulmate get so sick, and the pity at how broken his old friend and lover looked.   
  
It didn’t take long to get through the Holland Tunnel to Avenger tower. James sat on the floor of the back seat while Skye lay on the bench. She seemed to be losing touch with reality, because when Steve extracted her from the SUV, she muttered into his chest, requesting five more minutes of sleep from fire ants.  
  
Bruce was waiting for them on the medical floor. They had gotten one step into medical when Skye started to whimper. “Please don’Jemma, ’m sorry. ’m nota monster. Don’ kill me.” Instruments on tables started to rattle and Steve stepped back into the elevator, with Bruce shouting after them that he’d meet them on Steve’s floor in a moment.  
  
They laid her on Steve’s bed and bracketed her, speaking to her in low tones until she calmed down. Bruce came up not long after she calmed down and she allowed him to look over her, but still babbled continuously about not wanting to kill anyone and how she didn’t want to be a monster, which disturbed all three of them. After what seemed like hours, Bruce revealed that it was pneumonia, probably brought on by the flu, sending James and Steve into a panic like they hadn’t felt since the Great Pandemic.   
  
Even though Bruce assured them both that it was extremely treatable and Skye was in no danger, they silently sat vigil by Skye’s bedside. An IV stand was set up in Steve’s room through which Bruce could administer antibiotics. It was the longest night of Steve’s life. Steve could barely look at Bucky until Bucky came over and touched his arm. Steve looked at Bucky and saw the pain and sorrow in his face. “I’m sorry,” Bucky said softly.  
  
Suddenly, all the anger left Steve. “You have nothing to be sorry about,” he said quietly. “I’m the one that should be sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed…”  
  
“She’s on the run from SHIELD and HYDRA,” Bucky said. “She’s also terrified of herself.”  
  
“We’ll have to change that,” Steve said with conviction. Steve lay a hand on her forehead and winced at how warm Skye still felt.

 

\---------

 

Skye woke up alone and not knowing where she was, connected to an oxygen mask and an IV. Carefully, she pulled out her IV, took off the mask, and crept out of the room. She was in an apartment, she found, but it was deserted.   
  
She slipped out of the room into a hallway that was also deserted, but she heard shouting. Realizing that she recognized the voices as Coulson, Bucky, and… was that Steve Rogers? Skye moved toward the voices.  
  
A wave of dizziness passed over her and she gripped the wall while she edged closer to the voices. “-no right to keep her from us!” Coulson was shouting.  
  
“You have a lot of nerve, talking about rights. You never thought to tell us you were alive?”  
  
“I was under orders not to say anything!” Coulson returned as she got closer. “That isn’t relevant to the current conversation anyway. Skye’s powers are dangerous.”  
  
“Skye’s powers are being monitored by Bruce.” Steve said, quieter, but Skye was now close enough to hear him. “Regardless, locking her away isn’t the answer. Cutting her off from people is cruel.”  
  
Skye closed her eyes, remembering Steve’s voice, speaking to her as her body burned and her chest ached. She remembered hearing her soul words and Steve’s presence being an icy balm on the buzzing in her arms and head, but wondered if it had been a dream. She leaned more heavily against the wall, wheezing.   
  
“If I may interrupt,” came a new voice. “Miss Skye has left her room and is currently sitting outside.”  
  
Skye blinked and her soulmates were suddenly bracketing her, Coulson leaning over her. “I thought I told you to stay at the Retreat,” Coulson said.  
  
Skye shook, either with cold or fear. “The sys’em failed me,” Skye said groggily, tired from her walk from the bedroom. “Didn’ wan’ me any more so… lef’ me behin’...”  
  
Bucky and Steve both glared at Coulson while Bucky gathered her in his arms. “I’ll take her back and stay with her.” Bucky said quietly.   
  
“JARVIS, can you have Bruce come to our room to reconnect Skye’s IV?” Steve asked. Skye didn’t hear any more.

  
\----------

  
The next morning, Bucky carried Skye into the Hulk room, despite her objections that she could walk, and she told Thor, Bruce, and Steve her story. There were moments when the room started shaking and Steve and Bucky whispered words of comfort from either side of her until the quaking subsided, and other moments where she would wheeze and cough so hard they were afraid she’d break a rib, but she got through it. Thor was deeply troubled to hear that HYDRA had attempted to weaponize an Obelisk, but he wholeheartedly agreed to assist in training Skye to control her powers.  
  
Skye leaned against Bucky and Steve, listening as Thor and Banner debated techniques, drooping slightly. Telling her story had taken a lot out of her. Eventually, her soulmates carried her back to bed as she dozed. She knew in her heart no matter what happened, Bucky and Steve would never abandon her, and that was enough.


End file.
